Postcolonialism After World Literature: Relation, Equality, Dissent 9781350053021, 9781350053052, 9781350053038

Table of contents :
Half title
Series page
Title
Copyrights
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Why World Literature Needs Postcolonial Critique
1 A World Empire of Letters: Theories of World Literature from Nation to World-System
2 Modernity in Relation: Rethinking the Sociology of World Literature
3 Globalizing Dissent: Active Resistance and the Politics of Relation in Postcolonial and World Literatures
4 Enacting Equality: Postcolonialism After World Literature
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Postcolonialism After World Literature

New Horizons in Contemporary Writing In the wake of unprecedented technological and social change, contemporary literature has evolved a dazzling array of new forms that traditional modes and terms of literary criticism have struggled to keep up with. New Horizons in Contemporary Writing presents cutting-edge research scholarship that provides new insights into this unique period of creative and critical transformation. Series Editors: Martin Eve and Bryan Cheyette Editorial Board: Siân Adiseshiah (University of Lincoln, UK), Sara Blair (University of Michigan, USA), Peter Boxall (University of Sussex, UK), Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK), Rita Felski (University of Virginia, USA), Rachael Gilmour (Queen Mary, University of London, UK), Caroline Levine (University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA), Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck, University of London, UK), Adam Kelly (York University, UK), Antony Rowland (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), John Schad (Lancaster University, UK), Pamela Thurschwell (University of Sussex, UK), Ted Underwood (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA). Volumes in the series: Life Lines, John McLeod The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature, Isabelle Hesse South African Literature’s Russian Soul, Jeanne-Marie Jackson Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror, Susana Araújo Wanderwords, Maria Lauret Writing After Postcolonialism, Jane Hiddleston Forthcoming volumes: The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel, Diletta De Cristofaro Contemporary Posthumanism, Grace Halden Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing, Joseph Brooker New Media and the Transformation of Postmodern American Literature, Casey Michael Henry Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles, Caroline Magennis David Mitchell’s Post-Secular World, Rose Harris-Birtill

Postcolonialism After World Literature Relation, Equality, Dissent By Lorna Burns

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2021 Copyright © Lorna Burns, 2019 Lorna Burns has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Burns, Lorna, author. Title: Postcolonialism after world literature: relation, equality, dissent / by Lorna Burns. Description: London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.  |  Series: New horizons in contemporary writing  |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018048859  |  ISBN 9781350053021 (hb)  |  ISBN 9781350053038 (ePDF)  |  ISBN 9781350053045 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Literature–History and criticism.  |  Postcolonialism in literature.  |  Literature–Philosophy. Classification: LCC PN56.P555 B88 2019  |  DDC 809/.93358–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048859 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5302-1 PB: 978-1-3502-1148-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5303-8 eBook: 978-1-3500-5304-5 Series: New Horizons in Contemporary Writing Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction: Why World Literature Needs Postcolonial Critique 1 A World Empire of Letters: Theories of World Literature from Nation to World-System 2 Modernity in Relation: Rethinking the Sociology of World Literature 3 Globalizing Dissent: Active Resistance and the Politics of Relation in Postcolonial and World Literatures 4 Enacting Equality: Postcolonialism After World Literature

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Notes Bibliography Index

25 83 121 169 221 236 251

Acknowledgements I would like to thank colleagues and students in the School of English at the University of St Andrews for fostering the environment within which this book was written. To students on my Honours module, ‘Nationalists and Nomads: Contemporary World Literature’, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to explore many of these novels and theorists with you and it has certainly inspired my thinking over the past five years. I would also like to thank my undergraduate research assistants, Rowan Anderson and Claudia Mak, whom I employed in an attempt to create my own mini literary lab: Rowan Anderson researched essays in French on Dany Laferrière, Kamel Daoud and Édouard Glissant; Claudia Mak complied literary reviews and articles on the works of J. M. Coetzee and Arundhati Roy and proofread some chapters. I am grateful to both for their contributions to this book. To friends and colleagues, thank you for your conviviality and willingness to discuss aspects of my research. To that end, I thank Christina Alt, Wendy Knepper and Katie Muth who have all taken the time to read parts of this work in draft form. In particular, I would like to thank Katie for working with me on the colloquium ‘World Literature and Dissent’, which we held in St Andrews, June 2016, and for the edited collection which will soon follow. To everyone involved in the colloquium – Anna Bernard, Timothy Brennan, Sharae Deckard, Djelal Kadir, Oisin Keohane, Nick Lawrence, Dominic Smith, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Galin Tihanov and Robert Young – thank you for your contributions to a wonderful event and for inspiring discussions on the question of dissent in world literature. Thanks are due to Jane Stabler, who as Head of School generously allowed me some relief from administrative roles in the last stages of writing. Anindya Raychaudhuri and everyone in the Marxist Reading Group have been an invaluable sounding board for this project along the way – including Ben Hewitt, whose understanding of Moretti, Jameson and German philosophy has helped shape fundamental ideas at work in this book. I am grateful for the many conversations that we have had on Moretti, Coetzee, Nietzsche (and Deleuze’s Nietzsche). Finally, for their welcome distractions, thank you Matt Augustine, Alex Davis, Katie Garner, Clare Gill and Philip Parry.

Acknowledgements

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Invaluable feedback on the theoretical scope, aims and approach of this book was provided by Djelal Kadir, Stephen Shapiro and, as always, Nick Nesbitt: thank you all for your comments and ideas. Two events at the University of Leeds organized by Daniel Hartley in 2018, ‘World Literature and the Limits of Personhood’ (January) and ‘Archives of Resistance: Cosmopolitanism, Memory and World Literature’ (June), provided further opportunities for dialogue on aspects of this work and I would like to thank Daniel for the invitation to present at the January symposium. I would also like to extend my thanks to David Avital and Clara Herberg at Bloomsbury Academic for their support in the publication of this book and for keeping me on track, as well as to the series editors, Bryan Cheyette and Martin Eve. Reproduced in this book are short fragments of material published elsewhere, and I am grateful to those publishers for allowing me to expand on aspects of the following essays: Lorna Burns (2015), ‘Postcolonial Singularity and a World Literature Yet-to-Come’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 20 (4): 243–59; and Lorna Burns (2015), ‘Razing the Wall: Deleuze, Rancière and the Politics of New World Literatures’ in Ian Buchanan, Aidan Tynan and Tim Matts (eds), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature, 154–73, London: Bloomsbury. Lorna Burns, September 2018

Introduction: Why World Literature Needs Postcolonial Critique

World literature, whether approached under the sign of modernity, globalization or the capitalist world-system, is troubled by the shadows cast by the historical legacies of colonization and their postcolonial afterlives. The historical moment of world literature’s emergence as a concept in the nineteenth century coincided with a globalist expansionism that not only fuelled an increase in the circulation of texts across national borders (through trade), as well as linguistic ones (through translation), but was witness to the trafficking of peoples, assimilation of cultures and appropriation of geographically distant territories associated with European imperialism. As Caroline Levine and B. Venkat Mani have argued, it was ‘at the height of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, [that] many works from Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to circulate as part of a newly global publishing traffic. Goethe, after reading translations of Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese literatures – alongside his engagement with works in several European languages – gave traction to the term Weltliteratur in 1827’ (2013: 143). To view the problem of world literature in this way, as a concept borne out of the globalist push of European imperialism, is to bring attention to what Robert Young has described as the ‘virtually unmarked territory’ (2014: 213) shared between world and postcolonial literary studies. Aamir Mufti’s work can be read as a response to this rallying call, demonstrating the extent to which world literature needs postcolonial critique lest it become complicit with the global structures of capitalism that it might otherwise seek to challenge. World Literature, Mufti reinforces, appears at a time of colonial expansion and the orientalist ‘refashioning of cultures’ (2010: 464–5), both Western and Occidental: ‘the “discovery” of the classical languages of the East, the invention of the linguistic family tree whose basic form is still with us today, the translation and absorption into the Western languages of more and more works from Persian, Arabic, and the Indian languages, among others’ (459). This expansionism is clearly evident in Goethe’s proclamation of an incipient world literature, articulated, Eckermann’s journals reveal, in the context of

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the writer’s reading of Chinese, Sanskrit and Persian literatures.1 However, the implicit cosmopolitanism within Goethe’s comments regarding the shared human sentiments and cultural difference between him and the Chinese poets that he had read, Mufti argues, belies the singular force of Western modernity which draws all forms of cultural difference into a ‘plane of equivalence and evaluation’ (488). In other words, orientalism, in Edward Said’s sense of the term, makes possible ‘a single world as a space populated by distinct civilizational complexes, each in possession of its own tradition’ (Mufti 2010: 461), but it does so while attempting to assimilate those differences within the singular logic of imperialism.2 The perfect image of world literature by this account is captured, Mufti claims, in the infamous parliamentary minute written by Lord Macaulay in which he suggests that ‘“the whole native literature of India and Arabia” could be judged in terms of and therefore assimilated into “a single shelf of a good European library”’ (491).3 Today this sentiment finds its counterpart in a global publishing market in which Anglophone Indian writers are ‘packaged in the world literary system […] as an instance of pure diversity’ even while their educational background and literary success marks them as ‘the end product of an epochal historical process of assimilation’ (492).4 Understanding the modern capitalist system within which (neo-)colonial knowledge practices and contemporary publishing operate, then, can draw attention to the hierarchical relations of force that work to assimilate otherness and maintain inequalities. Indeed, as Mufti argues, it can raise an awareness of the dangers of too easily celebrating difference and diversity within both postcolonial and world literary studies, and highlight the need for a greater attentiveness to the relations of force operative within literary contexts and texts. While Young draws attention to the scarcity of critical works which synthesize postcolonial and world literature perspectives, an omission which the work of Aamir Mufti (2010, 2016), Pheng Cheah (2016) and Mariano Siskind (2014) has since begun to address, his own provisional attempts at doing so reveal the potential and problems of bringing together these two fields. On the one hand, Young argues, Goethe’s concept of world literature relies on aesthetic values and is defined ‘as the best literature, literature of such quality and insight that it transcends its local context to establish itself as universal’ (2014: 213– 4), and as such is an anathema to postcolonial writers and scholars who have sought to destabilize the ubiquity of so-called universal categories of taste and to challenge the dominance of Eurocentric forms and standards. On the other hand, contemporary world literature scholarship, such as that of David

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Damrosch (2003), Pascale Casanova (2005) and Rebecca Walkowitz (2015), reveals an attentiveness to the transnational circulation of texts and, as such, gestures towards an expanded canon that bears the sign of a hybridity borne from internationalization and the meeting of diverse cultures, sometimes ‘imposed without choice’ (Young 2014: 221). While the commonalities between postcolonial and contemporary world literary criticism are suggested by a renewed focus on global capital and its attendant forms of inequality, for Young, the two divide around the question of politics: while world literature must always make at least some claim to the attainment of universal standards of aesthetic value, ‘postcolonial literature makes no such assertion, and indeed insofar as it involves resistance, will always in some sense be partial, locked into a particular problematic of power’ (Young 2014: 216); aspiring ‘to expose and challenge imbalances of power, and the different forms of injustice that follow from such factors […] [p]ostcolonial literature will always seek to go beyond itself to impact upon the world which it represents’ (217). Together, these statements signal the coordinates that will orientate my interrogation of the contemporary fields of postcolonial and world literature throughout this book. Evident in Young’s claims is a view of postcolonial literature that identifies it primarily as a literature of resistance – literature that will aim to make a discernible impact on situations of injustice, exploitation and oppression within the world that it represents. By this token, postcolonial literature, Young argues, is specific and particular, and thus opposed to the universal values of world literature; postcolonial literature often moves ‘beyond itself ’ to make an engagement with the actual world behind mere representation, whereas world literature can conceive of an aesthetic realm apart. These assumptions, however, are the central points of contention throughout this book, both with respect to what they claim of postcolonialism and of world literature, and they can be understood as evidence of an increasingly prominent strand of world literature scholarship that mirrors, I argue, what Graham Huggan has referred to as ‘the overdrawn, often tedious debate between (post-)Marxists and poststructuralists […] that continues to some extent to split the postcolonial field today’ (2008: 11). By raising the problem of literature in relation to representation, political action and dissent, Young’s initial foray into the ‘virtually unmarked territory’ (2014: 213) of postcolonialism and world literature reanimates this debate anew. Postcolonialism After World Literature seeks to make an intervention on two fronts: first, as a reconsideration of world literature in recognition of its emergence as a field of study at the advent of European imperialism and, thus,

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as Stuart Hall (1996) argues, modernity itself (in other words, as inseparable from the discipline of postcolonial studies); and second, as a rethinking of postcolonialism that seeks to move beyond the poststructuralist/Marxist impasse while taking forward some of the lessons of contemporary world literature studies.5 Associated with the works of Aijaz Ahmad (2008), Nicholas Brown (2005), Neil Lazarus (1999, 2011a) and Benita Parry (2004), the second wave of postcolonial critique employed Marxist theories, most notably those of Fredric Jameson, in order to challenge an ‘incuriosity about the enabling socioeconomic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis’ (Parry 2004: 26) evident in the poststructuralist theories of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and, to a lesser extent, Edward Said. The accusation that Benita Parry posed against the postcolonial theory of Bhabha and Spivak foreshadows Young’s analysis of the divisions between world literature and postcolonialism more broadly and can be traced in an emergent strand of materialist world literature critique. At issue remains the question of the relationship between literature and the world: the degree to which a text represents a more fundamental reality or structure and how far its influence upon that world can be measured. World literature scholarship, to some extent, has overlooked the poststructuralist/ Marxist division within the field of postcolonialism: Pascale Casanova, for example, argues that postcolonialism in all its forms ‘posits a direct link between literature and history, one that is exclusively political’ (2005: 71), while Franco Moretti observes that with postcolonialism ‘a whole generation began to concentrate directly on historical materials, shifting the critical focus from the analysis of form to that of content’ (2000b: xiii). This elision, as I have argued elsewhere (Burns 2015), obscures the divisions within the field of postcolonialism between Marxists and poststructuralists, but it also serves to mask the extent to which world literature theory itself has reproduced aspects of this debate. By focusing on the mechanics of literary circulation, the world literary critics noted by Young above (Damrosch, Casanova, Walkowitz) can be broadly aligned with a materialist approach which views the text primarily as a product of the various factors that condition the literary field. For Damrosch (2003), literature becomes world literature only when it circulates beyond its originating national borders; for Casanova (2004), it is part of a world literary field unequal in its distribution of capital; for Walkowitz (2015), it betrays its global internationalism through its translatability. Literature by this account, as Ben Etherington has argued, is studied ‘as a special encoder of those conditions’ which structure the global literary field and, in turn, the objective of critique

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is to uncover ‘the material base through the superstructure of literature’ (2012: 539). World literature, following postcolonialism in its materialist, second wave articulation, can be read as a manifestation of the more fundamental modern global capitalist and imperialist world-system: an approach that finds its clearest articulation to date in the recent manifesto by the Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, a work which displays the close association of second wave postcolonialism with contemporary world literature scholarship in its collaboration between Benita Parry, Neil Lazarus, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Graeme Macdonald and Stephen Shapiro (cf. Warwick 2015). By their account, the world literary text will register the capitalist world-system, an approach indebted as much to Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious as to Franco Moretti’s and Pascale Casanova’s singular and uneven fields of world literature. It is this principle that belies the diverse body of work to have emerged in recent years from this materialist school of thought: Stephen Shapiro, for example, draws on world-systems theory to open up a long view of literary history in which comparison can break free of chronological barriers and periodicity, such that ‘nineteenth-century India might be reviewed alongside fifteenth-century England as both regions express their entry into the global capitalist world market through similar alterations in precapitalist caste, belief, and narrative systems’ (2008: 303); Michael Niblett supplements the theory with Jason Moore’s notion of a world-ecology and thus, repurposing the work of Lazarus and the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), ‘world literature will necessarily register ecological regimes and revolutions ([…], even if only negatively)’ (2012: 20); and while Michael Walonen (2016) and Melissa Kennedy (2017) note their dissatisfaction with a critical approach that takes literature as the secondary phenomenon of a more fundamental economic material base, both nonetheless maintain the notion that the literary text will register the unequal structure of capitalism in their different approaches to world literature.6 At the same time, theories of world literature continue to make the case for the specific work of language and discourse, an aesthetic that cannot be reduced to its material conditions.7 And so the debate rages on. Indeed, the problem set out in Casanova’s ‘What is a World?’ persists for both postcolonial and world literature scholarship: ‘Is it possible to re-establish the lost bond between literature, history and the world, while still maintaining a full sense of the irreducible singularity of literary texts?’ (2005: 71). Is it possible to find a middle ground between an ‘internal, text-based literary criticism’ which assumes ‘the

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total rupture between text and world’ and an ‘external criticism that runs the risk of reducing the literary to the political’ (71)? As will become clear in Chapter One, in which the world literature theories of Casanova and Moretti are addressed in some detail, I do not believe that Casanova’s work has found a solution to the question posed in ‘What is a World?’. It is, however, a challenge that Postcolonialism After World Literature takes up and explores through various philosophical treatises which test the Kantian division of a representational realm and that of real-world political action. Through the writings of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, this study seeks its own resolution to the intractable debate between poststructuralism and Marxist historical materialism by considering the ways in which these contemporary philosophers conceptualize a world provisionally constituted as an assemblage of forces and actors, none of which can be said to be either reducible or irreducible to anything other. Through the work of these philosophers, I argue throughout this book, the world and the literary text can be read as the unfolding of a process by which structures of dominance or inequality can emerge but never as the a priori conditions or teleological ends to which all actors are fated to be governed by. It is this a priori structural premise that the world literature theory of Casanova and Moretti shares with diverse contemporaries such as Sarah Brouilette (2011), Nicholas Brown (2005), Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett (2016; and Niblett 2012), Sharae Deckard (2012), Melissa Kennedy (2017), Leerom Medovoi (2011), Aamir Mufti (2010, 2016), Stephen Shapiro (2008), Michael Walonen (2016), and the Warwick Research Collective (2015), whose critical practices begin with an assumed structure of inequality inherent within the capitalist world-system, and which unites their field of criticism with second wave postcolonialism. In this respect, the influence of Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of the capitalist world-system on the emergent field of twenty-first century world literature studies cannot be understated. Explicit in the cases of Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova and WReC, the fundamental premise of a world-system that can explain the emergence and circulation of literary texts at a global level has profoundly shaped the field. Whether it is David Damrosch’s (2003) definition of world literature as a mode of circulation in which texts move beyond their national territories through circuits of global readerships, publishing and translations, Pascale Casanova’s (2004) account of a world literary space in which literary capital is unevenly distributed, or indeed an emergent strand of materialist critique that develops the notion of a world-ecology rather than simply a world-system (cf. Campbell and Niblett 2016; Deckard 2012; Niblett 2012), world literature theory proceeds

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on the basis of a systemic subtext to the literary work in question. For Aamir Mufti, such a recognition is vital if we are to fully account for the unequal relations of force that shape the modern world: Whether we view world literature (with Franco Moretti) as a conceptual organization rather than a body of literary texts or (with David Damrosch) as a special kind of literature, that which circulates beyond its ‘culture of origin’ – and this tension is inherent in and as old as the term itself – we cannot ignore the global relations of force that the concept simultaneously puts in play and hides from view. (2010: 465)

Acknowledging ‘global relations of force’ as they are betrayed through the literary text has, for good reason, as I shall account for in Chapter Four, become the cornerstone of materialist world literary critique. In the words of Neil Lazarus, world literature reveals ‘the literary registration and encoding of modernity as a social logic’ (2011b: 122), a critical approach echoed in WReC’s Combined and Uneven Development in which ‘world-literature’ is defined ‘as the literature of the world-system’ (2015: 8); ‘as the literary registration of modernity under the sign of combined and uneven development’ (17). Carrying forward Moretti’s claim that the world literary system is one that is both singular and profoundly unequal, as well Casanova’s hierarchical world literary space, WReC emphasizes that an acknowledgement of the ways in which texts reflect a global relation of forces is emphatically an admission of the vast inequalities of the capitalist worldsystem. The centre-periphery hierarchy uncovered by Moretti and Casanova thus becomes an avatar of imperialism and signals, once more, the closeness of world and postcolonial literary criticism. And yet, while Young maintains that postcolonialism is primarily a literature of resistance and dissent, WReC argues that works that fall under their concept of world-literature are not ‘only those works that self-consciously define themselves in opposition to capitalist modernity […] [or which] stage a coded or formally mediated resistance to capitalist modernity. As we understand it, the literary “registration” of the worldsystem does not (necessarily) involve criticality or dissent’ (20). Simply, the text will register the unequal relations that structure the world and the critic’s role is to uncover those traces and not the signs of literary forms of resistance or dissent. Recognizing what this leaves behind from postcolonial critique, Campbell and Niblett point out that ‘aesthetic form not only represents material reality, but also, in producing it as an object of perception and understanding, contributes to the remaking of that reality’ (2016: 5). While this acknowledgement of literature’s resistant capacity is a welcome refinement of the materialist position,

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Postcolonialism After World Literature seeks an alternative to the notion that the text is ‘an object of perception and understanding’, an approach that risks reaffirming the all-knowing critical stance which will reveal the repressed desires or political unconscious of the inert text, as Rita Felski (2015) and Bruno Latour (2004) have argued. A key contention of the philosophical approach utilized in Postcolonialism After World Literature is that while we cannot determine in advance what a text is capable of (Latour) we equally cannot rule out what it is incapable of (Rancière). As such, while there are no ontological grounds for claiming that a text must offer a source of resistance to global relations of force, there are also no ontological grounds for claiming that it cannot. The question then becomes one which asks us to consider what we as readers and critics can do with a text, how it provokes us to think, and, in turn, what opportunities are lost if we choose only to trace the registration, and thus efficacy, of the capitalist world-system without finding in the text an ally in the ongoing contestation and (re)assemblage of the world. Emily Apter has long been a vocal opponent of world-systems theory as the basis for world literature critique, which she views as positing ‘a one-worldist paradigm’ that ‘imagines the planet as subject to “the system” and wants to disable plans of escape’ (2006: 370) by inserting a teleological unfolding of history into its schemata. Against this she argues for a philosophizing of world literature that ‘work[s] against the temptation of allegories of World System or the Planet or Capital that impute subjective personalities to political entities and geographic phantasms’ (Apter 2010: 184).8 In this respect, Apter’s claims might be aligned with the work of Timothy Bewes, who argues for a ‘reading with the grain’ (2010) opposed to the symptomatic readings that follow in the wake of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche and assume a transcendental mode of reading in which the text is always the sign of some external form or state of affairs; the work of Wai Chee Dimock, who in ‘Literature for the Planet’ argues for ‘the messing up [of] territorial sovereignty and numerical chronology’ (2001: 174) through recognition of the reader’s role in staging the ‘now’ of any literary text; the work of Djelal Kadir, for whom the text is the space of its own ‘worlding’ (2013: 295); as well as the work of Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, whose concept of surface reading offers resistance to the Marxist critique of Fredric Jameson, and, in his wake, Neil Lazarus, which posits a political unconscious latent within the text and considers it to be the task of the critic to ‘rewrite narrative in terms of master codes, disclosing its status as ideology, as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. Like Althusser, Jameson saw the text as shaped by absence, but

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unlike Althusser, Jameson saw only one absent cause, history itself, and insisted that interpretation should seek a repressed, mystified, latent meaning behind a manifest one’ (Best and Marcus 2017: 5). Although these scholars cannot be said to be party to a single methodology, their work nonetheless offers an alternative to the materialist strand of world literary theory that has taken hold through the dominance of Moretti and Casanova in particular. Surface reading, for example, insists on ‘what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts […] rather than what we must train ourselves to see through’ (9); it is addressed to how a text works, the readings it makes possible, rather than the gaps and absences within a text which register what Jameson calls ‘a latent meaning behind a manifest one’ (2002: 45), or, as Lazarus defines it, a search for ‘not only what [a character] sees and how he sees it, but also how it might be conceptualized or understood, beyond the compass of his own awareness’ (Lazarus 2011b: 128). In this respect, surface reading chimes with the ‘post-critical’ turn advocated by Bruno Latour and Rita Felski.9 Rather than ‘digging down’ to reveal the overarching system of capital, imperialism or patriarchy which the text cannot help but register (to recall WReC), the post-critical agenda is one that asks us to ‘place ourselves in front of the text’ and reflect ‘on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible’ (Felski 2015: 12). As Bewes argues, ‘the text thinks’ (2010: 21). Of concern in the post-critical turn is the repudiation of a form of literary theory in which the practitioner is engaged, like the spirit of perpetual negation, in undermining the text – by revealing what it has excluded – or the reader – by exposing what they are blind to. Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice, in this respect, resonates with Moretti’s Signs Taken for Wonders, in which the reader is akin to the soul clutched in the claws of the harpy: ‘The soul is doing nothing to get out of the harpy’s clutch. […] Precisely because there is no escape it prefers to delude itself about the affectionate, almost maternal nature of the creature dragging it away with her in flight’ (Moretti 1988: 41). As will be discussed in Chapter One, literature in this image is the harpy, making ‘individuals feel “at ease” in the world they happen to live in, […] reconcil[ing] them in a pleasant and imperceptible way to its prevailing cultural norms’ (27). Moretti’s generalization of literature since 1700, then, is an extension of what Belsey found in the nineteenth-century novel: a deceptive realism that strives to naturalize a world view that is in fact ideologically and politically constructed. In Belsey, however, as Felski points out, only the reader is fooled by realism’s pretence to innocence (that the text is just a mirror of the world, no intended distortions): ‘This façade of innocence is pierced by the critic […]. The realist work is charged

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with fraudulence and fabrication, with masking social contradictions by pulling the wool over the reader’s eyes’ (Felski 2015: 95). Moretti is less overtly concerned with the critical revelation of the ‘truth’ of a text; however, as will be discussed in Chapter One, to the extent that Signs Taken for Wonders and Modern Epic point to literature’s function in securing consent or providing a rhetoric of innocence that sanitizes the violence that underpins our way of life, he too falls under the sway of the critical negativity exposed by Felski and Latour’s post-critical turn.10 This is not to say, however, that post-criticism refuses the idea that literature can produce consent, can form part of the articulation and strengthening of ideological norms, and can be political. Rather, Felski and Latour challenge the all-knowing critical position which seeks to expose the naiveté of reader and text, and, in so doing, confirm their own preconceptions. In its place, Latour proposes a new critical approach in which the object of study is an assemblage of actors and forces. As such, it is an entirely different attitude than the critical one, not a flight into the conditions of possibility of a given matter of fact, not the addition of something more human that the inhumane matters of fact would have missed, but, rather, a multifarious inquiry […] to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence. (Latour 2004: 245–6)

This, as will be discussed in Chapter Two, is where Latour brings actornetwork theory to bear on his Nietzschean aesthetics: every state of affairs is an assemblage of translations and connections produced via their relation to other actors within the network, and the work of the analyst becomes one of tracing those connections, mapping the network as it registers them, but not following them back to a single, systemic cause. At the same time, Latour grants his new critic a degree of creativity. If we take forward the problem posed by Latour in ‘Has Critique Run Out of Steam?’, then the critic is no longer ‘the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather’, they are ‘a constructivist’ (246). Texts not only think but also provoke us to think. The text does not stand out there in the world as a fixed and final gathering of parts, an assemblage of form and content, of the publishing world that facilitated the production and the imaginative world created by the author, but enters into new associations and is recreated anew with each reader. Each and every state of affairs, actor and object, creates its own world through the connections it assembles, provokes or prevents, and, as such, the literary text is both a world and part of the ongoing, unfinished and

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undetermined articulation of this world. The work of criticism is no less creative and world-making, as Felski recognizes. Refusing to approach the text as an object to be deconstructed, a sign of misrecognition, a mask for systemic causes, she argues, Reading, in this light, is a matter of attaching, collating, negotiating, assembling – of forging links between things that were previously unconnected. It is not a question of plumbing depths or tracing surfaces […] but of creating something new in which the reader’s role is as decisive as that of the text. Interpretation becomes a coproduction between actors that brings new things to light rather than an endless rumination on a text’s hidden meanings or representational failures. (Felski 2015: 173–4)

Understood in this way, and much like Dimock’s account of literature’s nonsynchronicity, texts cannot easily be segregated into periods and national canons.11 The act of interpretation brings the text into a new temporal scheme and geographical frame, and in this moment it becomes something new. Understanding the text as an assemblage and viewing the work of literary criticism as a coproduction between reader and text is what unites the philosophical perspectives explored in this book. From the viewpoint of world literature studies, Dimock (2001), Bewes (2010), Kadir (2013) and Best and Marcus (2017), to different degrees, resist the false opposition of world and text in favour of a relational process in which both are created and recreated anew. From a postcolonial perspective, the creative work of literature and philosophy is precisely the issue at the core of the Deleuzian turn within the field of postcolonial critique, as initiated by the work of Bignall (2010), Bensmaïa (2017), Bewes (2010), Burns (2012) and Patton (2010): in short, the articulation of a symptomatology that, unlike the Althusserian stance rejected by Latour, seeks not to dig down to uncover repressed causes but to create a new image of thought, a new diagnosis of our (postcolonial) world. The philosophical strands gathered in this book – Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière – cohere around a constructivist aesthetics in which literary texts and criticism are the sites of a coproductive relation of forces.

Literatures of resistance Post-criticism signals the need for an alternative to the structural premises and ‘digging-down’ approach of materialist critique, both postcolonial and world

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literary. However, as Best and Marcus readily admit of their concept of surface reading, it can ‘be dismissed as politically quietist’ (2017: 16). Bewes’s own theorization of world literary critique, however, points to a further dimension crucial for Postcolonialism After World Literature’s philosophical framework, one that he too explores through the writings of Gilles Deleuze. What one reads on the surface, for Bewes, is not merely the text’s actuality but also ‘something that escapes’ it: This element is never anything identifiable within or extractable from the work. Rather, this quality is accessible only in a reading whose object of study is the moment of reading, quite as fully as the text itself: a ‘circular’ reading – not simply of the text as encountered material object, but of the event of its production inseparably from the event of its reading, a reading with an eye to the reading that the text itself makes possible. The ‘political unconscious’, pace Jameson, is nothing other than the degree to which the text thinks. (Bewes 2010: 21)

These lines obliquely evoke the actor-network philosophy of Bruno Latour, in which the relation of actors is the primary focus of analysis. For Latour, as for Deleuze, there is no cogito or transcendental subject which exists first and then enters into relations with others; nor is there any teleological framework or a priori system within which a subject’s being unfolds. In this respect, the text, one actor among many others, is not simply an ‘encountered material object’ but something continually produced and reproduced through the translations and mediations of other actors in the network. Furthermore, as an actor, as that which has the capacity to affect, the text ‘makes possible’ countless readings, including the one created and assembled on the page by the critic. Such is the very working of thought itself: unconstrained by a priori or transcendental structures, thinking is participation in the network of actors. Where actornetwork theory and Deleuze diverge briefly is in relation to the role of the virtual, although, as I shall note in Chapter Three, Latour too finds it necessary to incorporate a notion of virtuality in his work in order to account for the production of the new.12 With Bewes, on the other hand, the Deleuzian virtual is implicit in his account of reading simultaneously with and against the grain: a reading that is attentive to explanatory historical contexts and the moment of reading as a deterritorialization of the text. Crucially, then, the virtual and actual must be understood as the two, unequal halves of a single reality: the virtual as the co-presence alongside the actual and not as its external or originary beyond. As John Sallis (1991) remarked of Nietzsche, it is the crossings between the two sides of a single reality and not their total separation that is the hallmark of

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immanent philosophy and, furthermore, which allows the philosopher to rethink ontology as a becoming that maintains the potential to challenge the status quo: this holds for Deleuze too. In Deleuzian thought, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter Three, deterritorialization, minor literature and becoming all signal that which escapes actuality – the potential within stratified power relations and majoritarian ideologies for their reconstitution as they are opened up to an outside which is never fully an outside. A concept of minor literature informs Bewes’s notion of reading against and with the grain as the framework for a new world literary criticism. Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature make clear that there is no encounter with a work of absolute minor literature, but, rather, they understand the text as a majoritarian form that enacts the deterritorializations which resist it (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1986). As such, Bewes argues for a reading ‘that engages with the radical instability, potentiality, and appropriability of the text, rather than its identity’ (2010: 18), and views this as a decidedly political act. In doing so, he refuses the view of literature as the mere registration of historical events and political sentiments: literature itself becomes a political actor in Latour’s sense of the term. Where surface reading and world-literature (WReC’s term) step away from reading the literary text as a resistant or dissenting voice, Postcolonialism After World Literature takes its cue from Bewes and views the combination of Deleuzian minor literature and Latourian actor-network theory as signalling the potential for a revised concept of world literature to participate in the politically charged arena of postcolonial critique without reducing the text to epiphenomenon of capital or mere reflection of material socio-historical reality. That the status of the political might be of particular concern to the postcolonial scholar recalls the seemingly irresolvable tension between poststructuralist and materialist critical discourses. As noted above, it is an issue that has resurfaced in world literature scholarship, which has tended to view the postcolonial as overly determined by political interests (cf. Casanova 2005: 71; Moretti 2000b: xiii). The question of how to understand the relation between text and world without reducing one to the other has remained a persistent issue in world literature criticism. Moretti’s work in the evolution of literary forms is an attempt to redress the materialist shift that he associates with the political criticism of the 1980s onwards. As he argues, the historicalmaterialist focus on content alone is not enough since ‘formal patterns are what literature uses in order to master historical reality, and to reshape its materials in the chosen ideological key: if form is disregarded, not only do we lose the complexity (and therefore interest) of the whole process – we miss the strictly

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political significance too’ (2000b: xiii). In this respect, for Moretti literature is never simply the registration of historical events or the world-system; its politics is not merely the recounting of actions and circumstance. Rather, the politics of literature is a mark of how the text inflects, reshapes and controls historical reality. This brings us closer to Bewes’s mode of reading with and against the grain insofar as it opens up the writing process to multiple perspectives and possibilities with respect to the representation of historical reality. It falls short, however, of the Felski-Latourian post-critical position that underlies Bewes’s concept in that it persists with the notion that the real meaning or ideological significance of the text is there to be uncovered by the careful critic. In Pascale Casanova’s attempt to address the relation between text and the world, and in order to preserve the political significance of the literary work, she reverts to Bourdieuian field theory in order to claim ‘a mediating space […] between literature and the world: a parallel territory, relatively autonomous from the political domain, and dedicated as a result to questions, debates, inventions of a specifically literary nature’ (2005: 71–2). However, as we shall see in more detail in Chapters One and Two, Latour’s own critique of Bourdieu’s sociological model can be used to put pressure on Casanova’s world literary republic: in short, the idea of a parallel, relatively autonomous literary world fails, in my view, to convincingly support a non-reductive account of the relation between text and world. To regard literature, as Bewes does, as an open potentiality for renewed interrogations of the text and the world is essential if the text is to be anything more than an epiphenomenon of the capitalist world-system or the unknowing carrier of more significant, latent ideological content. Djelal Kadir prefigures the sentiment at work in this approach, stating his hope ‘that our focus remains on literature and the world, rather than on world literature as a mere record of our inventions and their effects’ (2013: 296). This account sets itself against what Felski characterizes as the Jamesonian search for the latent meaning hidden within the text’s structure – one always uncovers what one originality intended to find (cf. Felski 2015: 56–7). Kadir’s reading of world literature accepts that critical perspectives will always be articulated from within a particular world view, but seeks to mediate between the tendency evident in Casanova to abstract the literary field towards a relative autonomy from historical context and ideology. World literature has always reflected a particular view of the world. Our working definitions of world literature never have been focused exclusively either on the literature itself or on the worlds it may have created. Nor, for that matter, have we been able

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to focus on the world in which literature is embedded without a sentience of literature’s role in shaping that world. […] What we can be sure of is that, as always, world literature is an institutionalized category of knowledge with its own axiomatic principles whose referents extend beyond literature as artefact and beyond the world as fact. (Kadir 2013: 294)

Contrary to Casanova, Kadir acknowledges that, in practice, literary criticism, whether postcolonial or formalist, has never been exclusively external or internal. Spivak (1985), for example, reads Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea and Frankenstein neither as self-referential, closed literary worlds nor as the direct registration of the world in which they are embedded. When Jean Rhys recalls reading Jane Eyre and being angered by the portrayal of Bertha – ‘I remember being quite shocked, and when I re-read it rather annoyed. “That’s only one side – the English side”’ (Rhys cited in Raiskin 1996: 133) – we witness in her reaction, in her novelistic counter-response (Wide Sargasso Sea), and in the discussion that that text has subsequently provoked, ‘literature’s role in shaping the world’. It is not the case that Rhys has uncovered the latent, suppressed truth of Brontë’s novel, thus putting to shame those feminist critics, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who find in the work of nineteenth-century women writers the inspiration to ‘attempt the pen with energy and authority’ (1984: 51). Both responses testify to literature’s capacity as an actor to both create its own world and to shape this one. Thus, Kadir’s suggestion of a concept of world literature that looks both to the text and to context refuses to prioritize one over the other. His approach to world literature is premised ‘on the recognition that (1) within literature itself dwells the precedent for literature’s own worlding and, simultaneously, (2) the world contains the potentiality for its own transformations into literary form’ (Kadir 2013: 295). There is no relative autonomy here with respect to a distinct literary field; rather there is a creative process at work, a relation of actors which is the potential for the creation of a world within the literary text, one that has the capacity to affect and change this world. This process, Kadir adds, is immanent to the text itself; premised on a reading that assumes that ‘the text already inscribes within itself, intimately and unavoidably, the analytic and epistemic protocols for its discursive and narrative permutation into the theoretical complexity of the critical field called world literature’ (300–1). Or, to recall Bewes, the text thinks. When we turn to a concept of world literature premised on a single, fixed and a priori system as that which carries the force of our analysis, be it Casanova’s world literary field or WReC’s world-literature as the sign of global capitalism, we perpetuate, Kadir argues, a critical apparatus

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that threatens to ‘subsume the world before it and to spectralize letters into the aura of its own afterimage’ (2013: 302). In other words, by predetermining in advance what can be read we are limiting the text’s capacity to think and to allow us, as readers, to think in new and unpredictable ways. Kadir finds in Casanova’s world republic of letters and in the Littérature manifesto, which sought to reposition the status of postcolonial Francophone writers, including Édouard Glissant (a writer we will encounter in Chapter Three), who felt marginalized by the centre-periphery organization of French writing and instead proposed a transnational world literature in French, a rejection of the nation in favour of a singularizing concept of literature. This is precisely what Erich Auerbach feared would be the entropic end of world literature: the transcendence of national literatures and particularities threatens to condemn us ‘to existence in a standardized world, to a single literary culture, only a few literary languages, and perhaps even a single literary language. And herewith the notion of Weltliteratur would be at once realized and destroyed’ (Auerbach 1969: 3). The paradox inherent in world literature, for Auerbach, is its tendencies towards both the celebration of diversity (expanding the canon, moving texts across borders) and the assimilation of difference within a singular framework. Or, as Mufti points out, diversity is an imperialist concept, inherent within the orientalist world view, and thus we must ‘move beyond appeals to diversity’ (2010: 493) and pay attention to the inequalities at work in the world today. This shift in focus from difference to inequality (or better, for reasons I will discuss in Chapter Four, equality) is one that postcolonialism can productively take forward from contemporary world literary theory. But in order to satisfy Auerbach’s concerns it is not enough to do so through the a priori assumption of a world-system and its literary registration as the explanatory force of critique. As Auerbach argues, ‘a point of departure should not be a generality imposed on a theme from the outside, but ought rather to be an organic inner part of the theme itself. What is being studied should speak for itself, but that can never happen if the point of departure is neither concrete nor clearly defined’ (1969: 16). Kadir and Bewes follow suit by refocusing critique on the text and the world as productive actors, each with the capacity to affect change and refigure other actors within its network. Faced with the alternatives of a totalizing world-system or a relatively autonomous literary republic which threatens to replace national literatures with its singularizing pull, Kadir argues ‘that the best antidote […] might be an insurgent, critical, and worldly literacy. And this literacy, I maintain, is to be found in the literary texts

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themselves’ (2013: 304–5). Finally, then, world literature is refigured as a process of reading, of interaction with a text and the experience of the transformations it induces; what Vilashini Cooppan calls ‘reading globally’ (2004:12), understood as an expanded relational and ‘connective mode of reading’ (13) that affords us the ‘opportunity both to learn from history and to change it’ (16). Nothing can predict in advance what additional processes those transformations will provoke. Under different circumstances Jean Rhys might have found in Jane Eyre an agreeable confirmation of the colonizer’s view of the colonized rather than an unsettling encounter which moved her to dissent from it. In other words, Kadir places the onus on we scholars and critics of world literature: in the face of the homogenizing world of globalization and capital that Auerbach identified we can either trace its registration or participate in the articulation of ‘an insurgent, critical’ practice. Whatever response we choose, however, its force will come from the text itself, from our readings and translations of it, and from the new literary world or symptomatology that, in a small way, our writing itself creates. The question of literary dissent is the substantial focus of Chapter Three of this study and rather than drawing on postcolonial theories of resistance it takes forward the critical project that I began in Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze, which sketched the outline of a Deleuzian postcolonial critique. Notably, this work argued that postcoloniality must be understood as distinct from both colonialism and counter-colonial resistance in that it denotes the total erasure of the oppositional framework which, however the sides are arranged, opposes colonizer and colonized, self and other. In Deleuze’s Nietzschean terms, it is the point at which the active forces of creation hold sway over the reactive forces of ressentiment. Through reference to the philosophy of defiance outlined in Howard Caygill’s On Resistance Chapter Three proposes a concept of literary dissent that stages the creation of new forms of belonging and alliance that reconstitute the social world anew: a postcolonial future and people yet-to-come in which the prevailing (but not a priori) structures of imperialism have been transformed. In this way, this book puts postcolonialism ‘after’ world literature in a dual sense: at once a reflection on what postcolonialism might become in the wake of a resurgent field of world literature and the setting of postcolonial theory in pursuit of world literary criticism, challenging its structural premises as well as the threat noted by Peter Hitchcock that the latter ‘allows one to consume postcolonialism without that nasty taste of social struggle in which the reader’s own cosmopolitanism may be at stake’ (2010: 5). Postcolonialism After World Literature does so, however, not through recourse to the canon of

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postcolonial theory, but rather, in Deleuzian style, by the creation of a new line of inquiry that responds to my fundamental sense of the postcolonial yet-tocome. The philosophers discussed in the chapters that follow are not typically read as postcolonialists but, I argue, their work can be put in the service of a new understanding of postcolonial studies around my subtitle’s three terms – relation, equality and dissent. Throughout this book, however, the texts that are brought into dialogue with each other and with the selected philosophical perspectives are drawn from a global range of contemporary postcolonial writing: Dany Laferrière’s I Am a Japanese Writer and Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile in Chapter One; Pauline Melville’s Eating Air in Chapter Two; Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg in Chapter Three; and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation in Chapter Four. To some extent, then, Postcolonialism After World Literature follows in the footsteps of recent postcolonial interventions in the field of world literature. Mariano Siskind, for example, like Mufti and WReC, finds in the text evidence of the inequalities of the capitalist worldsystem, arguing that Latin American literary modernity traces ‘a global relation, a set of aesthetics procedures that mediate a broadened transcultural network of uneven cultural exchanges’ (2014: 7), with the distinction that, in Siskind’s hands, world literature is understood ‘as the material production of a literary world that does not preexist the circulation of the texts and objects that makes its form visible’ (8). Siskind’s view of world literature from a Latin American perspective, in other words, acknowledges the limitations of assuming a fixed and a priori set of conditions into which the text, in a second moment, takes its position. However, as Chapter Four will discuss, recognition of the constructed, partial and changing nature of the systems and values against which we measure the text complicates the question of inequality. Implicit in Siskind’s comments is a view that holds that while inequalities are constructed rather than pre-existing givens, they nonetheless assume the baseline of his postcolonial critique of Latin American world literature. However, to turn to the philosophy of Jacques Rancière, without recourse to a priori values it can be argued that any measure of inequality assumes a corresponding equality: as he argues in Disagreement, ‘in the final analysis, inequality is only possible through equality’ (1999: 17) because experience tells us that ‘there is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey […] you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you. It is this equality that

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gnaws away at any natural order’ (16). Rancière’s philosophy, rather, begins with a constructed, non-pre-existing concept of equality rather than inequality and finds in works of literature, poems, historical records, artworks and so on, examples that demonstrate that fundamental but not a priori equality. This, I argue in Chapter Four with specific reference to Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, offers a strong alternative to postcolonialism’s celebration of difference and diversity in light of current debates in world literature. Indeed, as WReC emphasizes, the central contribution of Franco Moretti’s concept of ‘one, and unequal: one literature […] or perhaps, better, one literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is […] profoundly unequal’ (Moretti 2013: 46) can renew contemporary literary critique through the acknowledgement of a ‘system [that] is structured not on difference but on inequality’ (Warwick 2015: 7). While taking forward this impetus to disinvest postcolonial critique from a fixation on difference, Postcolonialism After World Literature asks what if rather than posing a theory that hopes to explain inequality, that focuses on ‘examples [which] confirm the inequality of the world literary system […] [that is] internal to the unequal system’ (Moretti 2013: 115) of global, economic capitalism, we turn our attention to that which stages a fundamental equality? Through the philosophy of Rancière, as discussed in Chapter Four, such an activity must be understood not as the mere registration of an evident hierarchy without criticality or dissent, but, in Rancière’s terms, as a dissensus: as a challenge to the forms of inequality produced by the police order, in his sense of the phrase, and as the enactment of a fundamental equality by making heard those voices (subaltern or otherwise) that were previously silenced and visible those actions that were previously discounted as meaningful activity. With Rancière, in other words, the demonstration of equality is always an expression of dissent, a refiguring or deterritorialization of accepted norms, and to that end, as I will argue in Chapter Four, his work can be read alongside that of Deleuze and Latour within Postcolonialism After World Literature’s reformulation of postcolonial literary critique as an active rather than reactive form of resistance to the constructed global hierarchy. Returning to the centrality of dissent as the mark of postcolonial literature aligns this study with the first sustained interrogation of world literature through the lens of postcolonialism: Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. This work reverses the central tenant of WReC’s manifesto by arguing that the literary registration of the world-system will necessarily reveal instances of resistance and demands for an alternative, more

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equal world. In exploiting Heidegger’s account of worldedness as an aesthetic process in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Cheah joins critics such Eric Hayot (2012) who seek to read the world of world literature as an indicator of a textual process: the creation of literary worlds. For both, a focus on content over form in literary analysis has obscured ‘the work’s relation to worldedness’ (Hayot 2012: 25). As Cheah makes clear, at issue is not literature as productive of ‘a possible world’, but as ‘a force of world-making’ (Cheah 2016: 3). The former refers to the idea of literature as a self-contained fantasy world, different to our own but sufficiently coherent as to stand as a plausible alternative, such as Tolkien’s middle-earth. In developing the latter concept, Cheah takes on a distinct philosophical conceptualization of aesthetics. Art has the function in Heidegger of world-making insofar as it can unify and organize our perception of the world. Different works create different ways of perceiving and understanding, and to that extent each work of art creates a different world.13 As Mark Wrathall explains, for Heidegger, ‘the role of great art is to make a world possible by letting a certain style for organizing things shine and attune us to them’ (2005: 83), ‘helping to establish a coherent style or way of being that can govern how everything appears’ (82). Thus, while there is common ground between the stance articulated in this book and Cheah’s conviction that ‘literature does not merely reflect social forces. It is itself an important force in contesting existing hierarchies in the struggle to remake the unequal world created by capitalist globalization’ (Cheah 2016: 58), by characterizing literature as a normative force, Cheah grants it a coherence that troubles its disruptive capacity. To be sure, Cheah argues that his ‘characterizing of worlding as a normative force is almost a catachresis, the use of a phrase because of the lack of better words that put its meaning under erasure’ (9). However, in my view, this is rather weak justification for the use of a term with such conservative connotations. As Mitchum Huehls points out in a different context, ‘if something is normative, its value, shape, or condition is predicated on a predetermined and artificially constructed standard or model – that is, on norms’ (Huehls 2016: 3).14 In other words, it returns us to the problem of an assumed a priori ground or system that determines being. Cheah’s argument veers between an embrace of active forces in the Deleuzian/Nietzschean sense as literature’s resistant potential and a Heideggerian commitment to coherence or normativity. It is, therefore, at once, a dissenting force that challenges global inequalities and illustrative of a fundamental process of perception-shaping, recreating the ‘world’s “literary” structure’ which ‘enables the world to persist and achieve stability’ (Cheah 2016:

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311). In its most generous sense, normativity points to those processes which create forms or ways of seeing that persist and are stable; that are repeatable and fixed. Active forces, in the strict Deleuzian/Nietzschean sense, however, cannot be defined as repetitions but as signs of creation and transformation that resist fixed forms of power as the eternal return of the new. As a result, Cheah’s theorization of world literature, or more problematically, perhaps, postcolonialism as world literature, encounters a conceptual knot, in my view, when he attempts to reconcile literature’s role as an active force of dissent with its normative function: in other words, in his seamless blending of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Postcolonialism After World Literature formulates an alternative approach that while retaining Cheah’s critical focus on dissent supplements the term with philosophies which maintain that literature’s resistance is a sign of its capacity to escape normativity, to deterritorialize fixed forms of being and to create dissensus within given social hierarchies. As argued by Simone Bignall in one of the first explorations of a Deleuzian postcolonialism, rethinking postcolonialism beyond the intractable conflict of Marxism and poststructuralism involves understanding the movement of an immanent duality and relation of active and reactive forces. What links these two projects, Bignall argues, is an ontological condition of negativity or lack: ‘In Marxist postcolonialism, this negativity is rendered in the dialectical play of opposition; in poststructuralist, deconstructive and psychoanalytic postcolonialism, critical negativity inheres in the crucial lack or absence at the ontological heart of the subject’ (2010: 76). Indeed, in this respect, Siskind’s attempt to formulate a postcolonial world literary analysis which resists nonpre-existing frameworks reproduces this tendency by characterizing the figure of the marginal, Latin American intellectual as ‘a constitutive lack, translated as a signifier of exclusion from the order of global modernity’ (2014: 9). Nicholas Brown’s comparative study of European modernism and African literature treads a similar path: arguing for the productive reimagining of utopian futures as more than a reworking of present-day relations of dominance, Brown nonetheless argues that such a future ‘cannot be represented except as a lack’ (2005: 22). For Bignall, theory premised on an ontological lack is ‘unable to break free from a fundamentally imperialist outlook and attitude, because it assumes an underlying concept of agency that remains grounded in negativity’ (2010: 20). In order to realize a condition of postcoloniality as the overcoming of ressentiment, the opposition of colonizer and (formerly) colonized, the negative ground of both Marxist and poststructuralist theories must be substituted with

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one defined, in the words of Howard Caygill, by ‘the invention of a life no longer shaped by responding to the initiatives of oppression and enemy’ (2015: 104).15 Postcolonialism After World Literature brings together literary works which stage a challenge to the persistence of ‘initiatives of oppression and enemy’: Pauline Melville’s Eating Air, discussed in Chapter Two, aims ‘to set the moral compass spinning’ (2009: 383) with a story, as I shall argue, which reveals the unrelenting struggle for dominance between consent (the state) and absolute resistance (anarchy), between Apollo and Dionysus (in Nietzsche’s terms); Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, as shall be argued in Chapter Three, poses new forms of solidarity and belonging within Delhi’s hijra community and among the victims of India’s leap into globalization; Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, a contemporary reworking of Antigone in the context of the war on terror, seeks to voice the lives of those denied visibility and, in so doing, as I shall argue in Chapter Four, demonstrates the equality that precedes every instance of inequality. At the same time, the novels discussed throughout this book remain aware of the risk inherent in each act of dissensus that new forms of oppression and inequality might return. Asking if this is ‘how literature is made’ (Bolaño 2009a: 127), Chapter One highlights Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, which, through the deathbed narrative of Father Urrutia, stages its own rhetoric of innocence against a backdrop of fascism; Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (Chapter Four) reflects on the growing religious fundamentalism of postcolonial Algeria as a sign of the unfulfilled promises of decolonization; while J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (Chapter Three) recreates the life of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky as he undertakes the writing of Demons and encounters the nihilistic force of revolution in Sergei Nechaev. If, as Deleuze argues, the writer’s role is to create a new symptomatology of their world, then Coetzee’s Dostoevsky reveals that the task of writing a people who are missing is an encounter with an otherness (a deterritorialization) that risks provoking a destructive force even while it holds out the potential for a future freed from ressentiment. For this reason, postcoloniality remains a yet-to-come and its authors are, in Deleuze’s sense, prophets of a future in which the whole imperial apparatus has been disbanded. This is where Postcolonialism After World Literature departs from the world-systems theories of Casanova and Moretti, who, as will be argued in Chapter One, posit assimilation as the inevitable fate of the difference or alterity carried by the world literary text and, as such, fall foul of Mufti’s claims that world literature risks becoming an orientalist exercise because the foreign is always co-opted into a horizon of the same. By contrast,

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through the philosophies of Latour, Deleuze and Rancière, this study finds in the literary and theoretical writings of postcolonial authors evidence of ongoing resistance to the assimilatory pressures of the core through an affirmative line of thought: positing not a critical negativity or lack, but the active forces of creation (Nietzsche, Latour), becoming (Deleuze) and dissensus (Rancière). Rather than revealing the efficacy of the world-system’s homogenization of global cultures, this book strikes out on an alternative path by means of aesthetic philosophies and literary works that promote literature’s capacity to challenge assimilatory pressures and the global, social hierarchy; to imagine new forms of belonging for both national and world citizens. Much more than a trace of capitalism’s material embodiment, world literature emerges through the philosophical perspectives explored in this book as an assemblage open to dissident acts of reading which imagine alternative forms of relation and demonstrate the persistent, nagging equality within the manifold forms of global inequality.

1

A World Empire of Letters: Theories of World Literature from Nation to World-System

World literature evokes in its very terminology an opposition, or at least an alternative, to the institutionalized framework of literary studies premised on the national canon: world rather than nation. Of course, writers and readers retain their national affiliations; as David Damrosch argues, ‘even a genuinely global perspective remains a perspective from somewhere’ (2003: 27). In turn, Damrosch theorizes world literature as ‘a mode of circulation and of reading’ (5), and as a term that can be evoked when texts ‘circulate beyond their culture of origin’ (4). Thus, a work of literature can either be attributed to a nation or classed as belonging to the world, depending on the position of the reader, and that ‘reader is likely to impose domestic literary values on the foreign work’ (4). Understood in this way, world literature risks becoming the appeal of the exotic, ‘a temporary frisson, a circumscribed experience of the bizarre’ (Clifford 1981: 542), to evoke James Clifford’s account of nineteenth-century European exoticism. By extension, then, this approach echoes imperialist practices since world literature is, as Damrosch claims, an encounter with ‘a distinctive novelty that is like-but-unlike practice at home’ (2003: 11). By prioritizing the national as the primary identification of the reader and text, world literature emerges as a process of extending outwards to impose national values on works that bear the sign of difference and, at the same time, as resistance to the complete acceptance of the foreign text as recognizable literature. The foreign text will always be ‘like-but-unlike’; ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha 1994: 86). Here the language of postcolonial hybridity aligns with Damrosch’s concept of world literature. The world literary text takes on the role of colonial subject: a marker of a difference and an ambivalence that disturbs the secure order of the colonial world view. For Mufti (2010), however, the hybridity of world literature, signalling both difference and the same, risks recalling imperialist orientalism: in its first articulation, world literature was an encounter between

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the European reader and the orient and, as such, carries with it orientalist connotations by which otherness is both represented and assimilated. This, of course, was always Auerbach’s (1969) fear for the fate of world literature: drawn towards the celebration of diversity but also the homogenization he witnessed in a globalizing modernity. As a result, as Vilashini Cooppan argues, ‘the globalization of literary studies has to mean something more than simply leaving the nation for that other social, political, and imaginative space dubbed by Arjun Appadurai as the “transnation”’ (2004: 20). Postcolonial scholars may find another reason for resisting the complete shift from nation to world. Speaking to the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Rome, 1959, Frantz Fanon argued that ‘the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation’ (2001: 199). Fanon’s valorization of the work of national culture in the legitimization of the newly decolonized nation inspired theorists to presume the close association of postcolonial and national literatures, even while the field is credited with expanding the canon and incorporating a greater diversity of global voices within the study of European literatures. Pascale Casanova (2004), as we shall see later in this chapter, deems postcolonial writing ‘small’ literature, and relegates it to the peripheries of her world literary republic on the grounds that it remains overdetermined by the politics of the new nation. Fredric Jameson (1986) has also made the correlation: drawing on the language of three-worlds theory, he proclaims that all Third World literature is national allegory. While Jameson ultimately offers a more productive understanding of the role of the nation in the postcolonial imaginary (cf. Burns 2015), the close association of national and postcolonial literatures misunderstands the nuance of postcolonial theorists on this issue. Fanon, for example, maintains the revolutionary capacity of national literature within the context of decolonization in terms of universal values. Colonialism pronounced universalist stereotypes in relation to the colonial other and, therefore, will ‘logically […] lead to the exaltation of cultural manifestations which are not simply national but continental’ (2001: 174), or in some cases global. In other words, writers in support of decolonization must also turn to the universal in their attempt to overcome imperial domination. Furthermore, this inevitable stage in the process of decolonization, the ‘logical’ progress to the point at which the colonized reclaim their culture, or what Fanon calls the ‘fighting phase’ (179), will itself ultimately come to pass, replaced by a universalist vision of a ‘new humanity’: ‘After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man’, to be replaced by

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a ‘new humanity [that] cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others’ (198). While Christopher Miller (1990) objects to the radical despecificity of this universalist vision, Neil Lazarus contends that far from denying the validity of African cultures, The Wretched of the Earth exposes the African subject as a construct of colonialism. There is, then, no originary national culture to which the colonial subject can return and thus Fanon’s work is the formulation of an ongoing ‘national project [that] also has the capacity to become the vehicle – the means of articulation – of a social(ist) demand which extends beyond decolonization in the merely technical sense, and which calls for a fundamental transformation rather than a mere restructuring of the prevailing social order’ (Lazarus 1999: 79). National literature for Fanon is both part of the construction of a postcolonial nation that is international, globalist and universal in its proclaimed values (cf. Fanon 2001: 199), and the articulation of a future open to the possibility that, whatever the failings of the national middle classes in the aftermath of decolonization, the social order can be transformed. Literature’s particular role in creating the potential for such change is, I argue, the claim of Jameson’s controversial ‘Third World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capital’. Despite the hostile reaction against this essay on the part of postcolonial scholars, such as Aijaz Ahmad (1987), it is this future orientation and potential for change that represents postcolonial writing’s insurgent capacity both within the context of the nation and, as Fanon reminds us with his vision of a new humanity, the world.1 Damrosch’s claims for a literature that is ‘like-but-unlike practice at home’ (2003: 11) can be reconceptualized through postcolonial theory. As it will be recalled, Bhabha’s precise definition of hybridity is an object that is ‘new, neither the one nor the other’ (1994: 25. Emphasis modified). The newness that, in their different ways, both Fanon and Jameson identify in the future-orientated task of postcolonial nation-building finds its complement in the transnational, global and universalist ground of world literature. The otherness of world literature is not simply an object to be assimilated by the values of the core, and although we cannot, as Djelal Kadir notes, ignore the institutionalization of this field of literary study (2013: 294) and overlook the imbalance of power and hierarchies that privilege specific genres, languages and forms, the difference, untranslatability and novelty of the world literary text persist beyond such imperialist pressures. This chapter focuses on two prominent theorists of world literature, Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti, in order to expose the ways in which their works foreground these assimilatory and resistant forces as

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structural principles of a single literary field. However, both, to different degrees, offer weak accounts of the latter, the resistant potential of that which exceeds the logic of representation. Casanova’s literary field, as outlined in The World Republic of Letters, and Moretti’s theory of literary forms traced from Signs Taken for Wonders to his influential ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ and beyond are restricted by a conceptual framework premised on a priori structures which tend towards the assimilation or management of otherness.2 As such, Mufti’s accusation that world literature simply extends an orientalist vision of difference in which the foreign is ultimately, always assimilated within the horizon of the same, holds in the case of these touchstones of contemporary world literature theory. This chapter and those that follow seek an alternative path: one driven by critical and philosophical theories of aesthetics that promote literature’s capacity to challenge assimilatory pressures and ‘the prevailing social order’ (Lazarus 1999: 79), and to imagine new forms of national and global belonging in the aftermath empire. Developing these ideas will take us through the philosophies of Bruno Latour, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, in each case adapting their work to the service of postcolonial critique. But first, in order to put postcolonialism in pursuit of an ascendant (in institutional terms) field of world literature scholarship, this chapter explores the details of Casanova’s and Moretti’s theories. It does so, in the first instance, by taking forward Fanon’s demand for postcolonial intellectuals and writers to address, at once, the worldly and the nationally specific, for it is this very division that challenges the assumptions and fundamental arguments of one of the most prominent theories of contemporary world literatures: Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters.

A world divided: Pascale Casanova’s world empire of letters Published in 2010, the same year as Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, The World Republic of Letters is underpinned by a conviction that while there may be a single literary space it is one marked by a fundamental inequality that passes unremarked by the presumptuous, arrogant ‘critics in the center’ (Casanova 2004: 355). This wilful ignorance is the target of Casanova’s book, and through an analysis of the creation and perpetuation of this inequality she hopes that it will ‘become a sort of critical weapon in the service of all deprived and dominated writers on the periphery of the literary world’ (2004: 354–5).

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In these terms it is easy to see Casanova’s appeal for Marxist and postcolonial critics seeking to engage with a renewed interest in world literature. And yet her admirable conviction, I argue, is not supported by a consistent theory of a world literary system unequally divided into core and periphery. In order to understand this conceptual entanglement, Christian Thorne argues, we must ‘realize […] how programmatically Casanova has grafted Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory onto Pierre Bourdieu’s account of distinction or cultural capital’ (2013: 59).3 From Bourdieu, Casanova takes up the notion of a literary field populated by ‘nothing so interesting as a rarefied temperament […] but an entirely mundane, nuts-and-bolts literary infrastructure: a leisured elite, schools willing to teach its patricians the skills of higher literacy, a caste of professional writers, bookstores, libraries, publishing houses, state patronage for the arts, and a functioning feuilleton’ (Thorne 2013: 59). From Wallerstein, she takes the central concept of world-systems theory: a single system of capital that is at once unified and marked by the unevenness of its distribution. Combining the two Casanova conceives of a literary field in which literary capital is unevenly distributed, with concentrations of ‘wealth’ cementing the power of key centres, most notably Paris, and poverty characteristic of the peripheries.4 ‘The best thing about her book’, Thorne concludes, ‘is that its title is simply wrong, utterly contravened by her own argument, which describes nothing like a “world republic of letters”, with whatever faded egalitarian associations that term still has, but rather a literary world-system, neocolonial in effect, if rarely in intentions: stratified, full of power imbalances, “a world of rivalry, struggle, and inequality”’: in short, an ‘empire-not-republic of letters’ (Thorne 2013: 60). By this measure of The World Republic it is clear that it falls far short of Casanova’s stated hope that her book will offer ‘a sort of critical weapon in the service of all deprived and dominated writers on the periphery of the literary world’ (2004: 354–5). In the face of an aggressively imperialist empire of letters one might expect such critical tools to take the form of a postcolonial or at least, preserving the binary opposition, counter-colonial stance that will enable those writers of the periphery to challenge their marginalization. However, as Thorne suggests and as I began to sketch out in a previous article (cf. Burns 2015), Casanova’s fidelity to an egalitarian world republic of letters creates a division at the heart of her book, encapsulated by its own two-part structure. It is this fracture that limits the extent to which her theory of world literature can be seen to resist the imperialism of the literary world-system or, indeed, to redress its inequalities.

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Part One of The World Republic of Letters establishes the case for a single world literary system, unequal in its distribution of capital. While recognizing that the history of literature begins with the nation, Casanova nonetheless argues for a world literature of translations and global circulations. This signals the common ground she shares with David Damrosch, for whom literature can be said to exist within a framework that is at once national and global. World literature, Damrosch argues, can always be read as national literature depending on the reader’s affiliations, but texts become world literature once they ‘circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language (Virgil was long read in Latin in Europe) […]: work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture’ (Damrosch 2003: 4). Damrosch clearly envisions a longue durée of world literature that far exceeds Casanova’s rather short-range – for Casanova the world republic emerges in the Romantic era alongside the rise of the modern nation-state – and Casanova’s Bourdieuian approach places far more emphasis on the significance of the canon and other forms of literary consecration than Damrosch does, as suggested by his well-known claim that ‘world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading’ (5). Nonetheless, circulation remains a shared characteristic of world literature for both theorists. As Casanova argues in her conclusion to Part One of The World Republic, ‘world literature does indeed exist today, new in its form and its effects, that circulates easily and rapidly through virtually simultaneous translations and whose extraordinary success is due to the fact that its denationalized content can be absorbed without any risk of misunderstanding’ (2004: 172). The work of translation, however, offers a good test of Casanova’s theory since it is at once ‘the foremost example of a particular type of consecration in the literary world’ (133) and a measure of a text’s denationalization. Successful translations are those that ‘can be absorbed without any risk of misunderstanding’; or in other words, which mask the national specificity of their originating contexts so effectively that there is no loss of meaning in the transition from one language into another. Of course, translation has been central to world literature since Goethe’s infamous Conversations with Eckermann: Goethe’s own encounters with translated works of Chinese literature inspired him to a cosmopolitan sense of commonality with and difference from diverse national cultures. His claim that ‘poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men’ (Goethe 1906:  212) is an

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extension of this sentiment insofar as it is through the translation of languages, myths and stories that the universal emerges. But it does so in endlessly recreative and specific ways, and, thus, what is translated is always ‘something new’ (209). By contrast, Casanova takes forward the universalist aspects evident in Goethe’s comments as a marker of a text’s autonomy, and thus its position within the literary republic. While Goethe’s celebration of Chinese literature depends upon a moment of recognition and the frisson of difference, a form of exoticism, to be sure, but nonetheless an encounter between self and other that preserves both the universal and the specific, Casanova characterizes world literature as an encounter with a text so utterly free and abstracted from its historical, political and national context that the reader perceives no difference whatsoever. For this reason, as Thorne demonstrates through Casanova’s own exemplars (Tolstoy and, above all, Beckett), modernism emerges as the pinnacle of literary autonomy: Modernism ratifies the condition of literature in translation, neither presuming local knowledge nor offering to produce it. And world literature is the name for a certain tendency toward abstraction within the global literary system, the propensity of works aiming for an international readership to make themselves frictionless. […] Such, in a nutshell, is Casanova’s splendid revision of the concept of Weltliteratur, which here stops functioning as the name for an (especially tedious) canon and instead makes its rightful contribution to a materialist history of letters. (Thorne 2013: 60–1)

World literature, understood in this light, already strikes the postcolonial critic as a suspicious entity, working towards the erasure of difference and alterity in favour of a generalizing abstraction: a point that is sustained as Casanova brings world-systems theory into the equation. Translation, Casanova further clarifies, is at once ‘a means of obtaining official entry to the republic of letters’ and, at the same time, a way of systematically imposing the categories of the center upon works from the periphery, even of unilaterally deciding the meaning of such works. In this sense the notion of universality is one of the most diabolical inventions of the center, for in denying the antagonistic and hierarchical structures of the world, and proclaiming the equality of all the citizens of the republic of letters, the monopolists of universality command others to submit to their law. (2004: 154)

If world literature does exist today as a global network of translation and seamless comprehension, then it does so only because texts have been judged by the consecrating powers of literary capital (publishers, academics, prize

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committees, journalists, government bodies, etc. ) to uphold falsely universalized norms. Depoliticization and the abstraction of literary form from expressly political or nationalist content thus becomes a violence inflicted by the core on the peripheries, and, as such, Caribbean writers like Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant can point to the ‘diabolical’ power of the centre as it works ‘to depoliticize politically dominated writers, preventing them from formulating political or national demands’ (Casanova 2004: 156). The literary republic, in other words, operates under its own rhetoric of innocence, to evoke Moretti (1996): a wilful masking of the violence that underlies the order that structures the literary world. In this case, it is the myth of a pure, autonomous literary sphere: a ‘fable of an enchanted world, a kingdom of pure creation, the best of all possible worlds where universality reigns through liberty and equality’ (Casanova 2004: 12). In channelling Bourdieu, Casanova can be understood as rejecting not the premise of an autonomous literary sphere but merely the assumption that it is a level playing field. While we might read in Casanova’s concerns for Chamoiseau and Confiant an ardent confirmation of the political efficacy of literature, this is simply at odds with the Bourdieuian framework. As Randal Johnson explains, within the Bourdieuian literary field, an ‘external determinant can have an effect only through transformations in the structure of the field itself. In other words, the field’s structure refracts, much like a prism, external determinants in terms of its own logic, and it is only through such a refraction that external factors can have an effect on the field’ (Johnson 1993: 14). Political contexts, historical events and national concerns affect the literary field only to the extent that they are translated into a literary logic, and, so it follows, the more successful the translation the more autonomous the work, hence Casanova’s privileging of modernism and abstraction. In ‘preventing’ Chamoiseau and Confiant from ‘formulating political or national demands’ through their literary works, the centre is, somewhat counterintuitively, allowing these writers to claim a greater degree of literary autonomy and capital by more effectively translating external political determinants into a literary logic. This process is the only means by which writers from the postcolonial world can escape their position of subalternity, since what is described in Bourdieu’s parlance as a translation of terms into an autonomous literary logic is, for Casanova, ‘a passage from literary inexistence to existence, from invisibility to the condition of literature’ (2004: 127). To become anything other than a part that has no part, to actually be counted as a citizen of this world republic, a writer must submit to the process of translation in which external referents are subsumed under a strictly literary

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logic. And yet, as we have seen, that literary logic is characterized by Casanova as a falsely normative universalism which serves to mask the hierarchical nature of the literary system. The writer, then, must either have no place within the literary realm or be admitted as a citizen of its empire through translation or other means of consecration. Thus, we begin to see the maddening circularity of Casanova’s arguments. She recognizes, for example, that ‘the autonomous pole of the world space is […] essential to its very construction, which is to say to its littérisation and its gradual denationalization’, and then proceeds to argue, on the very same page, that we must understand the literary field ‘as the product of antagonistic forces rather than as the result of a linear and gradually increasing tendency to autonomy’ (2004: 109). This is precisely what Thorne saw as the awkward marriage of Bourdieu and Wallerstein in Casanova’s argument. In the first moment, we are with Bourdieu and the literary field is autonomous to the degree that it successfully translates external factors into its own terms, in other words, the denationalization, depoliticization of literature. In the second, we are with Wallerstein and the literary field is a site of unequal relations and not the ‘gradually increasing tendency to autonomy’. However, despite these tensions, The World Republic of Letters ultimately relies upon the Bourdieuian narrative of progress towards increasing autonomy. Time and again Casanova’s reader is confronted with this circularity. Where, in the case of Chamoiseau and Confiant, depoliticization is read as a violent suppression of the writers’ political intentions on the part of the centre which mistakes its own norms for universals, in Part Two of her book Casanova claims that writers from the peripheries, if they are to ‘achieve literary existence’, must ‘struggle against the invisibility that threatens them’ and ‘create the conditions under which they can be seen’ by seizing their ‘creative liberty’ (2004: 177). Given her account of the empire of letters, it is difficult to see how this might be achieved by any other means than a capitulation to the values of the core. V. S. Naipaul is dismissed as a writer ‘naturally disinclined […] to innovate with regard to literary form or style’, engaged, instead in a ‘pathetic search for identity’ (212), not because in his desire ‘to become English’ (209) he is considered to have assimilated the values of the literary/imperialist core, but simply because he has swapped one national allegiance for another. Once again, the circularity of the argument confronts us: Naipaul is the mimic man par excellence, translating his political conservatism into novels traditional in character and evocative of the colonizer’s canonical style; and yet, at the same time, his literary consecration by the Nobel committee in 2001 ‘completed the process of assimilation by giving

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his literary and national transmutation its highest and most perfect form: an English writer who has now become universal’ (212). Casanova resists granting Naipaul entry into the autonomous republic of letters even while, by the logic of the Bourdieuian literary field, his status of Nobel laureate would allow him the capital to do so. A similarly perplexing situation emerges in Casanova’s exemplary writer of the world’s ‘deprived spaces’ (191), Chinua Achebe. The Nigerian writer is representative of literature’s foundational stage: if all literature moves from an initial proximity to national and political contexts towards a greater autonomy from them, then literature of the postcolonial world is characteristically regressive, fixed in a moment at which literature and politics are united in a common cause. In such circumstances, the writer becomes spokesperson for their people, participating in the articulation of an independent national identity. Such is the case, Casanova argues, with Chinua Achebe, a writer who stressed the necessity of the interrelation of literature and politics, rather than a ‘pure’ (200) art with no relation to the world: ‘Chinua Achebe was to become the bard and repository of Nigerian national history’ (196) and his novel Things Fall Apart was ‘at once a realist, didactic, demonstrative, and national novel, [displaying a] dual ambition [which] was to provide Nigeria with a national history and to teach this history to the people’ (196). Achebe’s work, in other words, is wholly determined by the national narrative, a didactic work of fiction that aims to recount national history rather than innovate literary forms, which is possible only at the autonomous pole of the literary system. However, the choice of Achebe as Nigerian national spokesperson is too simplistic. Nigeria, as Things Fall Apart precisely underscores, was a product of British imperialism – a nationstate imposed on the diverse cultures, traditions and languages that distinguish the Ibo, Yoruba and Hausa tribes (among others). Things Fall Apart, published on the eve of Nigerian independence, retells the destruction of a particular Ibo tribe as the colonizers impose their own culture and political systems, systems which gained a hold not by force of numbers but through the participation of the northern Hausa tribes, as the novel shows. The state apparatus that remained at independence was weighted to favour Hausa dominance in government, an imbalance that fuelled the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70. During this conflict Achebe was vocal in his support of an independent Ibo nation of Biafra and was subsequently exiled from Nigeria after the reinstatement of government. To what extent, then, can Achebe be aligned with the role of spokesperson of the new Nigeria? Casanova both assumes a cohesive notion of the nation that overlooks competing or marginalized perspectives within that narrative and

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refuses the idea that literature might participate in the construction of a national consciousness that has yet to come into existence.5 As we see in writers who articulate the moment of decolonization, such as Chinua Achebe or Ngũgĩ wa Thong’o, literature is involved in the evaluation of what form the nation might take, of where the boundaries will be drawn, of who belongs. Furthermore, although Achebe’s national loyalties remain with his native land and not the colonizer, as was suggested of Naipaul, Casanova argues that he shares with the Trinidadian writer a conservative, traditional literary style. Speculating on the implications of Casanova’s argument beyond her own considerations, we might ask if, like Naipaul’s consecration by the Nobel committee, Achebe’s own literary success might not be a sign of his own accumulation of a significant degree of literary capital.6 By Casanova’s own reasoning, such accumulations across the international stage are possible only to the extent that his work translates national characteristics into universally appreciable ones, suggesting that, in contradiction of her own characterization of the writer, Achebe is far more than spokesperson of the Nigerian (or perhaps more pointedly Ibo) people. The problem that we run up against in Casanova is that the international literary space or core is both the hegemon (the empire of letters) and the measure of artistic autonomy (the egalitarian republic), and in trying to allow it to function in both senses while maintaining elements of the Bourdieuian field principle Casanova’s argument undermines itself. It is not simply that, as Christopher Prendergast has argued, there are ‘two types of literary “autonomy”’ at work in The World Republic, ‘a false or mystified kind, which arises when a major literary power has accumulated sufficiently large amounts of literary “capital” as to allow the writer to go about his or her business relatively unmolested […]; and a true autonomy, hard-won in the struggles of the “ex-centric” to enter the force field of the literary system’ (2004: 10): these are merely two different routes to an autonomy that is contradictorily characterized as both imperialist and a source of freedom in Casanova’s theorization of world literature. And, most problematically from the postcolonial perspective, it means that even while she contends that the work offers the tools of resistance to writers of the peripheries, Part Two of The World Republic condemns literature from the peripheries to a position of subalternity. Despite her revelation of a false universality at the literary core, there is a clear teleology at work in Casanova’s theoretical account of world literature in which literary history moves progressively towards the sharp division between literature and nation or politics. Thus, in the Irish context, Casanova argues, the insurgents of the 1916 Easter Uprising read

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Yeats, Synge and Douglas Hyde, and yet, a paragraph later she claims that such ‘politicization of Irish literary space supplies the measure of its dependence’ (190). If literature is in any sense ‘a weapon of combat and national resistance’ (191), then its effects are only perceptible in the national, political sphere and, as such, not visible at all within the literary field. Moreover, the subversive ends to which anticolonial resistance movements aim are wholly thwarted in literary terms, since the greater the politicization of literature the greater ‘the measure of its dependence’ on the imperialist core at the centre of this so-called republic. Nationalist literatures, which emerge from the peripheries will take ‘recourse to a functional aesthetic’, employ ‘the most conservative narratives, novelistic, and poetical forms’ (199). World literatures, on the other hand, display their autonomy through ‘the depoliticization of literature’ and, as a result, in them we will find ‘the almost complete disappearance of popular or national themes, the appearance of “pure” writing – texts that, freed from the obligation to help to develop a particular national identity, have no social or political “function”’ (199–200). Casanova might, at times, rail against the fairy-tale ‘kingdom of pure creation’ (12) and present herself as the saviour of literature’s subaltern; however, the teleology of The World Republic is undeniably one that sets up ‘pure’, depoliciticized, denationalized writing as the end game of literary history. This, then, is the great fault-line that runs beneath Casanova’s book and which leaves The World Republic open to strong criticism from a postcolonial perspective, so much so that we must begin to question the ubiquity of the source in contemporary world literature criticism.7 Christopher Prendergast (2004) and Christian Thorne (2013) are distinguished by their robust responses to the conceptual problems that arise from Casanova’s assumptions: indeed, most damming of all, from a postcolonial perspective, is Thorne’s observation that for all that Casanova reveals of a literary world characterized by divisions and disputes fuelled by vested interests, false universals and an unequal distribution of literary capital, it is nonetheless patiently obvious that ‘Casanova aggressively prefers such abstraction and falsely universal writing, routinely declaring international modernism superior to rival literary modes’ (2013: 61).8 It’s like getting to the last page of Wallerstein and finding out that he’d been promoting free markets all long. Casanova thus reliably inverts the anticolonial position, championing Caribbean and Arab and Asian writers when they take up European intellectual tools against their own peers, as when she praises the Algerian novelist Rachid Boudjedra for ‘employing the weapons of writers in the center in order to subvert social and religious proprieties [in North Africa]’. (62)

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In other words, if we were to translate this into the context of postcolonial literature, the subversive side of writing back when viewed through Casanova’s account lies not in its Caliban-esque mastery of the colonizer’s literary language and forms, but, in its capacity to free writing from its social, cultural and political context and gain entry into the autonomous republic of letters. This is the very logic of the Bourdieuian literary field at work, as Casanova imagines it: ‘The original dependence of literature on the nation is at the heart of the inequality that structures the literary world’ (Casanova 2004: 39), and therefore, peripheral writers who wish to claim a position of greater equality must do so by abandoning any ambitions for their work to become a tool in the service of national decolonization or the imagining of a postcolonial nation yet-to-come. Casanova’s world empire of letters is a troubling basis for a revived concept of world literature, and the following chapters will further elaborate an alternative theoretical framework for world literature after postcolonialism. At issue is not only the conceptual problems associated with her application of Wallerstein and Bourdieu, but also her dismissal of the creative work of literature that is at once national and universalist. For Fanon, it will be recalled, while recognizing the complicity of universalist concepts with imperialism, he nonetheless maintains, within his account of the nation-building work of the postcolonial intellectual and writer, a recognition of the creative, future-focused orientation of this task. In the absence of an original national culture to which the colonial subject can return, national literature must be the production of a new and original cultural form – in Lazarus’s words, ‘a fundamental transformation rather than a mere restructuring of the prevailing social order’ (1999: 79). Rather than relegating ‘small’ literatures to the peripheries of the world literary space, even in Casanova’s terms, the political demands placed on the postcolonial writer without an original culture to reflect means that their work is, by necessity, innovative, creative and new. By fixating on the political overdetermination of literary works from the peripheries of the literary field, Casanova, in my view, fails to make a distinction between anti-colonialism and postcolonialism. Colonial subjects, be they complicit with or up in arms against the colonial order, are wholly defined by their position vis-à-vis the colonizer: colonial culture in that moment can be considered overdetermined by political context. But, as Fanon himself acknowledges, the fighting phase of colonial resistance must pass and with it ‘the disappearance of the colonized man’ (Fanon 2001: 198). Tunisian theorist, Albert Memmi, makes a similar claim when he argues that after the period of conflict and ‘in order to witness the colonized’s complete cure, his

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alienation must completely cease. We must await the complete disappearance of colonization – including the period of revolt’ (Memmi 2003: 185). The entire ‘colonial framework’ must be abandoned and ‘it is important for all of us to discover a new way of living with that relationship […] to find a new order of things with Europe [which] means putting new order in oneself ’ (190–1). In other words, the whole oppositional framework between colonizer and colonized, self and other must be abandoned and replaced with the self-determination of a subject who, while existing in relation to others, is free to construct their own subjectivity without being tied to essentialist, oppositional and predetermined categories of identity. This is where postcoloniality emerges as an active rather than reactive relation of forces, always creative and participating in a yet-tocome community rather than an established, fixed one. This key claim underpins the characterization of postcolonialism as a critical position and the demands it makes of world literature are explored throughout Postcolonialism After World Literature, but it leads too to a reconsideration of the role of the reader. As we saw in Damrosch, discussed in the opening to this chapter, the reader is complicit in the worlding of a work of literature. Edwidge Danticat, while reflecting on the challenges faced by an immigrant writer in the contemporary world, argues that reading too is a political act. Writers, Danticat argues, ‘create dangerously, for people who read dangerously’ (2010: 10). This is not simply a case of a risqué exposure to the exotic other, as Damrosch’s echo of exoticism might suggest when he argues that world literature can be understood as an encounter with ‘a distinctive novelty that is like-but-unlike practice at home’ (Damrosch 2003: 11). Rather, it is a political imperative: to create dangerously is to view creation as a revolt against silence, ‘it is creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive’ (Danticat 2010: 11). The issue of world literature and dissent is the substantial focus of Chapter Three, so for now I simply want to draw attention to the element of risk in Danticat’s claims. To be sure, she has in mind totalitarian regimes and oppressive ideologies when arguing that literary creation can be dangerous – in her country, Haiti, Jacques Stephen Alexis was tortured and killed, ‘some say’, for attempting ‘to help topple the Duvalier dictatorship’ (Danticat 2010: 12). However, the risk too is in a book’s reception, since ‘the writer bound to the reader, under diabolic, or even joyful, circumstances inevitably becomes a loyal citizen of the country of his readers’ (15). Danticat has in mind here a very specific work by her compatriot writer, Dany Laferrière, and that association, I suggest, takes her argument in a very

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different direction than that pursued by Damrosch. That the writer takes on the national affiliation of their reader is a premise explored by Laferrière in his 2008 novel, I Am a Japanese Writer, and the implications of that worlding do not lead us towards the assimilation so feared by Auerbach, nor to the persistence of difference implied by Damrosch. Rather, Laferrière gestures towards that universal space of a ‘new humanity’ proposed by Fanon, but, crucially, unlike Casanova, without reifying a separate realm of literary singularity.

On being (and not being) a national writer Dany Laferrière’s own literary career testifies to the problematic of national affiliation. Laferrière was born in Haiti in the midst of the political turmoil and repression of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship. Aged twenty-three, he fled to Montreal after the murder of a fellow journalist, where he found night work as a janitor while writing his first novel, How to Make Love to A Negro Without Getting Tired: a book intended to provoke through its employment of racial and gendered stereotypes in its account of the life of a black writer in Montreal. After becoming a Canadian citizen, Laferrière left Canada in 1990 to settle in Florida, where he continues to produce French-language fiction and non-fiction. In recognition of his contribution to French letters he was inducted into the Académie Française in May 2015. As the press surrounding this event made clear, he joins a small handful of writers elected to the Académie as nonFrench citizens (this select group currently includes François Cheng [born in China, elected in 2002]; Amin Maalouf [Lebanon, 2011] and Michael Edwards [Britain, 2013]). Indeed, as Rachel Donadio’s (2015) piece in The New York Times highlights, he is only the second black man after Léopold Senghor in 1983 to have been bestowed this honour. There is, then, within Laferrière’s own biography clear signals that a complex and fluid concept of national identity will be a core concern of his work. Indeed, a few months before his election to the Académie, Laferrière spoke in Paris about his national affiliation, claiming that ‘I don’t just come from Haiti or Quebec; I also come from the books in my library’ (Laferrière cited in Donadio 2015: n.p.). The rejection of an essentialist national identity in favour of a literary identification that transcends the nation-state is a theme taken forward in his novel I Am a Japanese Writer. Narrated by a fictionalized writer who, like Laferrière, was born in Haiti but lives in Montreal, the novel’s premise is that the unnamed writer has been contracted by a publisher to write

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a novel on the merit of its title (I Am a Japanese Writer) alone and that, despite the fact that the book itself does not yet exist, it has begun to attract considerable attention in Japan, such that it has become a cult phenomenon. By reflecting on the right of an author to claim an alternative national affiliation, I Am a Japanese Writer may be read as a fictional exploration of Laferrière’s own assertion that ‘a writer’s country is their first library’ (cited in Jaggi 2013: n.p.) and, as such, can evoke for us the divisions of Casanova’s literary republic. However, as shall be argued in what follows, with Laferrière we can challenge the despecifying pull of Casanova’s theory as, ultimately, Laferrière’s text reveals the impossibility of fully separating the spheres of literature and the political. Resisting the attempts of academics and publishers to tie writers to a particular geography or context, the fictional author of I Am a Japanese Writer claims that I don’t understand all the attention paid to a writer’s origins. Because, for me, Mishima was my neighbour. Very naturally, I repatriated the writers I read at the time. All of them: Flaubert, Goethe, Whitman, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Kipling, Senghor, Césaire, Roumain, Amado, Diderot – they all lived in my village. […] Years later, when I became a writer and people asked me, ‘Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a French-language writer?’ I answered without hesitation: I take on my reader’s nationality. Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer. (Laferrière 2010: 14)

This comment might be exaggerated as a Barthesian ‘death of the author’ – authorial intent, context and ideology are all disregarded as the reader becomes the sole source of meaning, projecting their own historical, national and ideological context onto the text – and, indeed, Danticat makes this connection in her claim that Laferrière can be read as ‘concurring with the French literary critic Roland Barthes [and the idea] that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”’ (Danticat 2010: 15). Characteristic of this passage, however, is instability rather than unity: the diverse canon and historical range of literature evoked by Laferrière puts pressure on the notion that the reader can become the unifying factor when faced with such disparate works. In part, it evokes a concept of world literature, in the sense employed by Damrosch, as texts which circulate beyond their national origins; however, it does so without reinstating the idea of a stable point of origin: Laferrière’s narrator refuses to define himself as Haitian, Caribbean or French, and as such troubles the possibility of any secure national affiliation. As Rachel Douglas notes, this is characteristic of Laferrière’s work more broadly, since for this writer ‘labels

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and pigeonholes […]: Caribbean, Antillean, immigrant, postcolonial, or even Haitian’, are to be ‘avoid[ed] at all costs’ (2011: 67).9 I Am a Japanese Writer, then, presents the world of world literature as a destabilizing relationality in which texts can be both national and worldly, fluctuating and changing constantly as they are picked up and read by different readers. Tentative forms of national affiliation can be momentarily assigned to any author by the reader who ‘repatriate[s]’ them into their own cultural horizon, a process that reveals its imperialist tendencies when considered in light of Casanova’s characterization of translation as an appropriation which normalizes signs of cultural difference. However, Laferrière seems unconcerned by the warnings of world literary critics such as Emily Apter (2013), who question the translation of literary texts across incommensurate cultures. In his introduction to a reissue of Antoine Rivarol’s 1783 speech to L’Académie de Berlin, Laferrière (2014) acknowledges the influence of negritude and the demand that writers reject the language of the colonizer, French. However, he argues that today, with the predominance of the English language, perhaps we need to leave the whole notion of superior and inferior cultures or languages behind; and that, recalling Wole Soyinka’s denunciation of the negritude movement – ‘A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces’ (cited in Jahn 1968: 265–6) – black writers ought to move beyond this defensive or oppositional stance which preserves the binary of colonizer and colonized.10 Laferrière does not write in his mother tongue (Haitian Creole), but nor does he write exclusively under the weight of colonial history: he writes in a new language, a new grammar of the self and the world.11 Free to use a new language, in turn, translation becomes ‘the dream of any book’ (Laferrière 2014: 12) since it is a process, as Goethe also observed, of remaking the work anew.12 By this account, novels are ‘born translated’ in the sense employed by Rebecca Walkowitz (2015): immediately available to the work of translation, which is for Laferrière the very act of reading. At the same time, this activity resists the pull of secure origins, whether those of the author or the reader, and as such Laferrière refutes the idea, later put forward by Casanova, that translation leads necessarily towards a homogenizing horizon of the same. While he may ‘become a Japanese writer’ when read by a Japanese reader, Laferrière’s narrator refuses to be tied to any national archetypes or traits – ‘I didn’t say I am the Japanese writer. I said I am a Japanese writer’ (136). I Am a Japanese Writer develops an image of a literary world and of aesthetic experience as a relation between text, author and reader. Literature by this model can be understood as a relation in the sense argued by Édouard Glissant: an ontological condition or sphere that is immanent to the world and which

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is expressed as an activity of linking co-creative actors.13 Laferrière gestures towards this shared sphere of the imagination as, at once, an escape from the world and as an indivisible part of it. Recalling his childhood interest in the Japanese author Mishima, the narrator claims, ‘I read him to escape the prison of the real. But I did not seek refuge in Mishima – literature was never a refuge for me. Neither did Mishima, I imagine, write to stay in his own house. We encountered each other elsewhere, in a space that wasn’t either of our houses, a space that belonged to imagination and desire’ (12–13); Mishima’s book didn’t say to itself, ‘Well, well, here’s a good old Japanese reader’. And I didn’t look for a kindred spirit, recognizable colors or a shared sensibility. I dove into the universe that was set before me the way I dove into the little river not far from my house. I hardly even noticed his name, and it wasn’t until long afterward that I realized he was Japanese. At the time, I firmly believed that writers formed a lost tribe and spent their lives wandering the world and telling stories in all languages. (13)

Laferrière does not ‘look for a kindred spirit, recognizable colors or a shared sensibility’ and he is little concerned with what Casanova describes as the ‘risk of misunderstanding’ which motivates translations and texts that favour ‘denationalized content’ (2004: 172). Denationalization, to the extent that it is a force acting upon the text, is inspired less by the demands of the marketplace for Laferrière, and more by an aesthetic experience that is, nonetheless, a part of this world. As such, his words echo an account of literature and the act of reading offered by another Caribbean author, Derek Walcott: I knew, from childhood, that I wanted to become a poet, and like any colonial child I was taught English literature as my natural inheritance. Forget the snow and the daffodils. They were real, more real than the heat and the oleander, perhaps, because they lived on the page, in imagination, and therefore in memory. There is a memory of imagination in literature which has nothing to do with actual experience, which is, in fact, another life, and that experience of the imagination will continue to make actual the quest of a medieval knight or the bulk of a white whale, because of the power of a shared imagination. (1998: 62)

Laferrière and Walcott hold in common this sense of literature as a shared plane of the imagination: for Walcott the imperialist politics of the Western canon do not preclude the possibility of an aesthetic engagement with those British texts he studied at school as a child of empire. This is where Casanova’s criticism of postcolonial writers as overdetermined by political contexts fails to match

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the nuances of their explorations of the terrain in between the nation and the world, politics and aesthetics. But nor should these invocations of a universal, shared plane of the imagination be taken as confirmation of her abstracted, pure literary republic. Walcott resists the notion that ‘a memory of the imagination’ can be reduced to ‘actual experience’ because this would demote that memory to a secondary status – literature as a reflection of a more fundamental reality – in the same sense that he refuted the idea that his reworking of the European epic tradition makes Caribbean literature derivative of an original canon.14 What Walcott describes is not escapism from reality, but another reality that becomes actual through the act of reading. Similarly, Laferrière’s narrator reads Mishima ‘to escape the prison of the real’ in the sense of an overbearing reality which prescribes national affiliations but that does not mean that he intends to reduce literature and imagination to the status of unreality or to posit the absolute autonomy of the literary field from the political as the ideal condition of artistic invention. It is, the fictional writer claims, ‘always important to appropriate the story. For literature to truly exist, books would have to be anonymous. No more ego, no more personal intervention’ (Laferrière 2010: 170), which would be an impossible situation. In other words, there can be no pure literary realm, only mediations and translations as the writer (as Goethe also recognized) ‘appropriates the story’ and creates something new. I Am a Japanese Writer presents us with an image of world literature understood, as Djelal Kadir contends, as that which begins with ‘the recognition that (1) within literature itself dwells the precedent for literature’s own worlding and, simultaneously, (2) the world contains the potentiality for its own transformation into literary form’ (2013: 295). Laferrière’s novel evokes a universal, shared world literary space, one which infringes on the ‘actual’ world of the novel and makes its impact clearly felt – as we see in the hysteria created by the fictional author’s non-existent novel. At the same time, the world itself finds expression in the literary sphere of imagination through the subjectivity of the writer: as he claims, ‘I  never write about anything but myself ’, ‘my Japan is invented and concerns only me’ (Laferrière 2010: 73). Moments of ‘personal intervention’ in the novel reveal the world in literary form; a paradoxical movement encapsulated in Kadir’s formulation. It is a paradox, however, that signals the contours of a relational, dualistic and singular reality, and it is for this reason, Laferrière argues, that Legba is ‘the god of writers’; Legba, who ‘allows a mortal to move from the visible world to the invisible world and then return to the visible world’ (cf. Laferrière 2015: n.p.).15

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The literary world evoked by Laferrière’s novella both recalls the postcolonial interrogation of nationality and roots and resists the singularizing pull of Casanova’s pure literary realm. In turn, world literature can be reframed as a hybridization of national affiliations: indeed, as John Pizer (2000) has argued, the image of a nation-state marked by ambivalence and hybridity, as evoked by the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, can be traced in Goethe’s original framing of the concept. For Bhabha the nation is split by the ambivalence generated by its performativity both with respect to its temporality – the people must be constructed in the present through a constant repetition as an alwaysalready constituted ‘historical presence’ (Bhabha 1994: 147) – and the contours of its identity – at once a self-generated image of coherence and that which is differentiated in relation to the other and the outside. Bhabha’s interrogation of the temporality of the nation as a hybrid form finds its complement in world literary theory, I suggest, in Wai Chee Dimock’s ‘Literature for the Planet’. In an echo, for us, of Laferrière’s imaginary realm of diverse and historical writers and texts, Dimock argues that literature is a ‘continuum’ that ‘extends across space and time, messing up territorial sovereignty and numerical chronology’ (2001: 174). Against Benedict Anderson’s perception of cultural artefacts as the products of the nation-state – literature as epiphenomenon of the nation it legitimizes through the standardization of place and time – Dimock argues for the anarchic effects of literature. As Laferrière’s nameless narrator recalls, the writer discovers their shared bond with other writers across time and space, as if time and space were of no consequence. The privileging of national affiliations and temporal boundaries (such as when literary critics group writers together as Romantic, Victorian or modern), ‘uphold[s] territorial sovereignty and enforc[es] a regime of simultaneity, literature, in my view, unsettles both’ (Dimock 2001: 175). Just as, for Laferrière’s novelist, ‘when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer’ (2010: 14), for Dimock ‘the now experienced by any reader is idiosyncratic’ (2001: 174). A reader might encounter a text with a sense of the immediacy of the character and language, or they might feel them to be archaic. In other words, it is not calendar time that determines the temporality or synchronicity of the literary text but the reader and, moreover, there is no guarantee of consistency between readers. As a result, ‘the temporal disunity among readers – relativity of simultaneity suggests that the continuum of literature is anarchic: impossible to regulate or police’ (174). Of course, at an institutional level we attempt to do so all the time: in English Studies the university curriculum and characterization of academic

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research segregates literature into distinct chronological packages. In this typical approach to the discipline, as Rita Felski argues, ‘both period and nation serve as a natural boundary, determining authority, and last court of appeal. The literary work, it is assumed, can only be a citizen of only one historical period and one set of social relations’ (2015: 158). In conforming to the contrived territorialization of literature according to time and place, national literature, as Anderson presents it, is an inherently conservative form. Literature in itself, on the other hand, is ‘the enemy of the state. Its projective and retrospective horizons play havoc with territorial sovereignty’ (Dimock 2001: 175). Accordingly, ‘Russian poet is, strictly speaking, an oxymoron’ (178) and ‘Dante […] both is and is not Florentine’ (178); or to evoke Laferrière’s protagonist, he is and is not a Japanese writer. This distinction, Dimock reveals to us, is not merely a question of geography (national affiliation) but temporality, and it points us towards a further element of Casanova’s world literary theory that postcolonial critique tests: the privileging of a literary core that is not merely autonomous but modern.

On being (and not being) modern Dimock, as we have seen, offers a model of the literary field that can be sharply delineated from Casanova’s. Both share a suspicion of national literatures as inherently conservative forms: for Dimock, national literatures conform to an illusory spatial and temporal simultaneity; for Casanova, national literatures are overdetermined by the political concerns of the nation. In a sense, then, both are responding to Anderson’s account of literature’s role in the creation of the imagined community that is the nation. However, only with Casanova do we find an alternative concept of the literary world as a pure space detached from politics. With Dimock we can say, contrary to Casanova, that literature resists the attempts of the nation-state to concretely define and regulate its territorial borders not by refusing to engage with the world of politics, but by exposing those constructs as an illusion, as a performance, to recall Bhabha. Moreover, where Dimock exploits the potentiality of a non-synchronic temporality to theorize literature’s dissident, anarchic force, Casanova confirms the essential teleology of capitalist modernity. Although criticized (along with Franco Moretti) for having no concept of time in her theory of world literature by Pheng Cheah (2016), Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters emphatically relies on an account of modernity as a teleological unfolding towards a predetermined end (pure

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literature) and, paradoxically, at the same time, as premised on the disjuncture between past and present. She argues, for example, that ‘in the German case, romanticism was, and at the same time was not, national; or rather, it was national to start with and then subsequently detached itself from national authority’ (Casanova 2004: 38). This statement rests upon a rather tenuous equivalence: it is simply not the case that to be national and, at the same time, not national is equivalent to being first national and subsequently autonomous. In the first instance we are in realm of Ernst Bloch’s non-contemporaneity, a key feature of Moretti’s Modern Epic – the simultaneous coexistence of divergent historical epochs or times with modernity at its core and regressively lessmodern temporalities towards the peripheries; in the second, this constructed and hierarchical temporality is replaced with an assumed teleology which, while it may share its constituent features of modern core and archaic periphery, makes the Hegelian mistake of privileging an ontological ground that is determined in advance of its construction.16 In Casanova, the teleological end of literary history is an a priori autonomy from national contexts. Those writers most celebrated in part two of The World Republic of Letters, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner and, above all, Beckett, are distinguished as great revolutionaries by their ability to fully realize that autonomy. Thus, ‘the ultimate step in the liberation of writing and writers, their final proclamation of independence, consists in affirming the autonomous use of a purely literary language’ (Casanova 2004: 345), as is found in the especial case of Samuel Beckett: Surely no writer up until the present day has gone further in the invention of a literary language than Samuel Beckett, whose texts are among the most autonomous ever imagined. […] His increasingly rigorous and precise quest for a radical autonomy led him to break with all the forms of national dependence peculiar to writers: the nation in the political sense, of course, but to a still greater degree the debates concerning literary history, the aesthetic choices dictated by national literary space, and finally language itself, conceived as a set of laws and rules imposed by political authorities that work to subject writers to the national norms of the national language. (346)

Attached to Beckett, in Casanova’s account, is the language of emancipation, absolute freedom and artistic autonomy as markers of the playwright’s core position within the literary republic. There is no question at this point in the argument that such autonomy is the pinnacle of literary achievement and the teleological end of literary history. That end, however, is not necessarily a finality – the end of history – because what specifically constitutes literary autonomy is

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not simply abstraction, as Thorne (2013) argues, but a measure of modernity itself. The rivalries, struggles and contestations which create disparities within the literary field are not, in the typically Bourdieuian sense, concerned strictly with the distribution of literary capital but with what constitutes modernity, what breaks with tradition and innovates new literary forms. It is by this understanding of the literary field as a temporal, not merely spatial, structure that we can make sense of Casanova’s objections to Naipaul and Achebe since by materialist markers of esteem and publication sales alone both carry significant literary capital. What materialist accounts typically take as signs of literary prestige and capital are, in Casanova, distinguished according to the guiding teleology at work in her book: literature in the first moment is established and legitimized via markers determined by political and national authorities, but will progressively succeed in freeing itself from external determination and establish its own specifically literary resources and measures of esteem. It is time, the marker of ‘the now’, that breaks from the conservatism of the past and signifies a measure of a specifically literary capital. Her concept of the Greenwich Meridian of Literature is presented as a spatial concept via the metaphor of a carpet which stands for ‘the totality of what [Casanova] call[s] world literary space’ (Casanova 2004: 3): ‘everything that is written, everything that is translated, published, theorized, commented upon, celebrated – all these things are so many elements of a vast composition’ (3). This demands a dual perspective since a ‘work can be deciphered only […] in relation to the entire literary universe of which it is a part’ (3). Within this totality, however, a median must emerge to give structure to what would otherwise be chaos: ‘Literary space creates a present on the basis of which all positions can be measured, a point in relation to which all other points can be located’ (88). Not the position of the critic, reader or writer, but the present, modernity itself, is the organizing principle of the literary universe, its temporal meridian. Furthermore, since ‘the modern by definition is always new, and therefore open to challenge, the only way in literary space to be truly modern is to contest the present as outmoded – to appeal to a still more present present, as the yet unknown, which thus becomes the newest certified present’ (91). The meridian line, in other words, is an always shifting horizon and a source of contestation. It may well be that those nations more advanced on the trajectory towards autonomy have a greater capacity to reshape what constitutes modernity – ‘The temporal law of the world of letters may be stated thus: it is necessary to be old in order to have any chance of being modern or of decreeing what is modern’ (89) – but as the case of small nation writers such as Joyce and Beckett makes clear, the meridian line of the present is always renewed and

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contested. In setting out the structure of The World Republic of Letters, Casanova transposes Bourdieu’s notion of the literary field, in which external influences can affect the field only to the extent that they are translated into an internal logic, onto a temporal framework of literary modernity. Literary history, in other words, is a narrative that reveals the gradual separation of historical time (the time of the nation, of politics and of society) from literary time, which is freed from such concerns. Although Casanova writes of ‘the necessity of reestablishing the original historical bond between literature and the world’ (350), it is only as a starting point in a teleological narrative that ends in the realization of their complete separation. Literary history might reveal an initial connection between literature and the world, but only in order to trace how the world, its history, politics, social revolutions and environmental evolutions, becomes detached and the autonomous literary republic reaffirms its position as the core measure of literary time and value. This is a theory essentially premised on a radical break between text and world, between modern and non-modern, centre and periphery. The international literary space, world republic or core once again emerges irreconcilably as both hegemon (maintaining the conditions under which small literatures remain dependent, deprived and aesthetically conservative) and the measure of artistic freedom or autonomy as the horizon of the present. But what if, to evoke Bruno Latour, the core has never been modern? The work of sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour offers a productive counterpoint to Casanova’s Bourdieuian literary universe. Casanova, I suggest, grounds her materialist literary history upon a weak principle of irreducibility, arguing that ‘literature may be defined – without contradiction – both as an object that is irreducible to history and as a historical object, albeit one that enjoys a strictly literary historicity’ (350). Here we are once again with Bourdieu: literature is a historical object only in a strictly literary sense, and its strength as a field depends upon its irreducibility to anything other than itself. Latour, on the other hand, argues for a principle of irreducibility that maintains the full individuality of every actor and their absolute relationality: ‘Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else’ (1993b: 158). Casanova views literature in its ideal form as irreducible, denying all relationality and creating an autonomous republic detached from the world. Latour presents a more radical materialism that begins with ‘no a-priori definition of what is strong and what is weak’, only ‘the assumption that everything is involved in a relation of forces’ (7). In Latour, the material universe simply is what it is, complete unto itself and relational. It is, however, his account of modernity in We Have Never Been Modern that both lays the foundations for this materialist ontology and

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returns us, unknowingly, to the division at the heart of Casanova’s literary field. As will be addressed in Chapter Two, Latour offers a way beyond the impasse created by the union of world-systems theory and world literature with respect to its reliance on a temporal framework that marks a division between modern and premodern literary forms. Latour will take us in the direction of a rather different philosophical tradition than that traced by Casanova – one that begins, for Latour, with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. An engagement with literature can be, as Nietzsche suggests in The Birth of Tragedy, an activity of lifting the veil of illusion to reveal the primal chaos beneath. Dimock evokes this in her reference to the anarchic force of literature. Moreover, far from marking literature’s distance from the world of politics, it is this activity that makes literature ‘a political force in the world’ (Dimock 2001: 175). Dimock names this ‘Literature for the Planet’, rather than world literature per se. Certainly, she constructs her theory of an anarchic, planetary literature in opposition to the national model, but the concept emerges more as a general condition of literature rather than a specific formulation of world literature. The planetary or worldly dimension is the inherent condition of all literatures; it is, as Kadir argued, ‘the precedent for literature’s own worlding’ (2013: 295). At the same time, however, the national dimension persists within the texts we encounter as the imaginative, concrete expression of its geographical and chronological specificity. For Nietzsche, a dual structure underpins his aesthetic theory in which the Apolline domain of form and nation coexist with the Dionysian excess that threatens to dissolve it. Dimock’s essay implicitly articulates something of this Nietzschean aesthetics in her argument for an understanding of literature as ‘a temporal hybrid, a hybrid accidentally born into the world’ (2001: 179) through the act of reading and, crucially, as a dissident, anarchic and ‘political force in the world’ (175). World literature, by this account, might be best understood as the general condition of literature, as literature-in-itself (without, however, the Kantian connotations that this might evoke, for reasons that will become clear in Chapter Two). As a result, it also denotes the capacity of literature to resist the territorializations of national culture – to participate in a radical restructuring of what is perceived to be its essential and fixed components. The Nietzschean literary aesthetics broached above, and developed in subsequent chapters, stands in tension with the predominantly systemic approaches to world literature offered by Casanova and the Warwick Research Collective (WReC). As we have seen, for Casanova revolution occurs only in literary form and at the point at which literature is most distant from the world of politics. WReC (2015) more clearly proclaim their application of Wallerstein’s

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world-systems theory, arguing for a world-literature that is attentive to the inequalities created by the capitalist system. The usefulness of this idea I do not deny and, indeed, I take it up in a more forceful way in Chapter Four where postcolonialism’s focus on diversity and difference is reconsidered in relation to the imperative to redress inequality. However, their emphatic claim that the concept of ‘world-literature’ be best understood as ‘the literary “registration” of the world-system’ and therefore ‘does not (necessarily) involve criticality or dissent’ (Warwick 2015: 20) reduces literature to the status of global rather than, as we saw in Dimock, merely national epiphenomenon. Dimock claims neither the impossibility of national literatures nor the idea that literature will always be read as a disrupting, dissenting and destabilizing force. It is, however, a general condition of all literature that it has the potential to do so and thus literature is an ‘enemy of the state’ (Dimock 2001: 175) and, by extension, of the global, capitalist world-system. Postcolonialism After World Literature develops a theory of literature’s resistant potential without recourse to arguments which seek to either reduce the literary to the political or posit a teleology that progresses towards their absolute separation. The remaining chapters explore philosophical perspectives on this question through the work of Latour, Deleuze and Rancière, all of whom offer an alternative to the poststructuralist/Marxist divide noted in the introduction by developing an ontology of immanence rather than negation or lack. This, I suggest, can move world literary theory and postcolonial critique alike beyond the materialist frameworks of Casanova, and as we shall see in a moment, Moretti, which posit a priori structural causes. The rest of this chapter, then, will explore in more detail the application of world-systems theory in the work of Franco Moretti, whose theorization of world literature provides the inspiration for WReC’s materialist approach. While drawing attention to some of the conceptual problems that this theoretical commitment raises for a postcolonial take on world literature, I also focus on the ways in which Moretti’s work can counterintuitively lead us towards a renewed sense of world literature’s capacity for dissent.

Close and distant reading: Franco Moretti, evolution and the world-system Where Pascale Casanova’s theory of a world literary republic is founded on the combination of Bourdieuian field theory and Wallerstein’s sociology of the

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world-system, her contemporary theorist of world literature, Franco Moretti, pursues another alliance: that of world-systems and evolutionary theory. It has been Moretti’s engagement with the former, most notably in his ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, that has secured his place in the ‘Holy Trinity’ (Forsdick 2010: 130–1) of world literature scholars – Moretti, Casanova and Damrosch – however, the remainder of this chapter will explore the confluence of and individual theoretical problems within these two aspects of Moretti’s approach to world literature. ‘Conjectures’ is most often identified with a concept later described by Moretti as a ‘fatal formula’ and ‘joke’ that, perhaps rightly, nobody got (2013: 44) because of its radical challenge to the way in which literary scholars approach their object of study: distant reading.17 As a model for world literature critique, distant reading denotes a method that begins with the identification of a unit of study (a literary genre, form, theme or trope) and leads to a process of mapping the evolution, mutation, strengthening or fading of that unit across a segment of the literary field. The greater the segment – the wider the historical and geographical coordinates of the field of study – the greater the distance from the text. While this formula can, Moretti acknowledges, lead to a critical practice in which literary history is ‘a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading’ (48), the expanded scope of world literature nonetheless demands this sacrifice. Close reading depends on a closed canon: a select few masterpieces that the individual or academy deems worthy of close scrutiny. Moretti’s point is not directed against value judgements as such, but rather it is a recognition that the sheer scale of literary output in the contemporary period, the diversity of linguistic registers involved, makes the task of the world literary critic an impossible one if we take the object of study to be the entirety of published works. Even if guided by the canon and designated classics of world literature, the critic must negotiate a diverse range of languages, contexts and texts, and therefore ‘world literature cannot be literature, bigger; what we are already doing, just more of it. It has to be different’ (46). The problem facing the world literature scholar, however, is complicated by the structural inequality that ‘Conjectures’ identifies at the heart of the world literary system and this, of course, is where he inspires the theoretical shift to world-systems theory: I will borrow this initial hypothesis from the world-systems school of economic history, for which international capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world

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Postcolonialism After World Literature literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal. (Moretti 2013: 46)

Here Moretti stakes a claim for the productive alignment of economic and literary history, each viewed in terms of capitalist distribution. Literature, like the capitalist world economy, is a single ‘world literary system’ with a core, a periphery and a semi-periphery. The shift from national literatures to a single world literary system as the central premise of analysis takes its cue from Marxist thought, most notably Leon Trotsky whose writings are distinctive for their turn to the world economy rather than localized relations of production, as was characteristic of Lenin’s writings (cf. Barker 2006: 72–4). In Trotsky’s view, ‘Marxism takes its starting point from world economy, not as a sum of national parts but as a mighty and independent reality which has been created by the international division of labour and the world market and which in our epoch imperiously dominates the national markets’ (Trotsky 1970: 146). The national literary market, we might say along with Moretti, is not an autonomous entity but one facet of a wider system, determined by the ‘independent reality’ of the global industry, international publishing houses and readerships, literary prizes and, moreover, the historical evolution of genres, forms and motifs. If we follow Trotsky’s account then nations (and by extension national literatures) must be understood as fragments of a whole that always exceeds their totality. The nation ‘constitutes a part of the world unity’, for Trotsky, while simultaneously he maintains that the world economy is ‘not […] a sum of national parts’ (146). This explains Moretti’s departure from close reading and national literatures: the problem of world literature will always be greater than the combined canon of national literatures. What underlies these two perspectives, and what WReC find most productive in the work of Moretti, however, is a focus on system rather than a fixed totality: literature ‘as neither a canon of masterworks nor a mode of reading, but as a system’ (Warwick 2015: 7). World literature is at once constituted by an almost ungraspable diversity of national texts and is irreducible to them. In this respect, Moretti’s work might be amenable to the postcolonial perspective of a theorist like Édouard Glissant, who refigures postcolonial hybridity as a form of relation or creolization understood as a ‘complex mix’ that ‘is only exemplified by its processes and certainly not by the “contents” on which these operate’ (Glissant 1997: 89). However, where Glissant’s work expresses its resistance to Hegelian notions of both totality and teleological process (dialectics), Moretti’s model of world literature repeats the essentialism found in Casanova above.

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Where Bruno Latour’s critique of Bourdieu draws attention to the philosophical problem of a priori structures – a primary social field – that lies behind the work of his fellow sociologist (as we will explore in more detail in Chapter Two), both Moretti and Casanova follow suit by providing an account of literature that relies upon a fixed structural premise. For Moretti, world literature is not an object but the workings of an a priori system subject to analysis and interrogation; a single system structured by ‘a relationship of growing inequality’ between the core, periphery and semi-periphery. Read in Casanova’s terms, Moretti’s claim reproduces the idea of the literary field – a singular field of literary production structured by the uneven spread of literary capital that cannot be wholly reduced to the power relations which structure the ‘real’ world. Alternatively, read against the context of world-systems theory, Moretti’s work provides the impetus for WReC’s concept of world-literature in which literature embodies the wider, more fundamental inequality of the modern capitalist world-system and thus above all else we can expect to find in texts the trace of this political unconscious. In the first, literary history is a telos towards a realm of pure aesthetics with no relation to the world; in the second, literature is the epiphenomenon of the primary structure of global capitalism. Moretti’s turn to evolutionary theory in his work is, in part, an attempt to address the question of world and text, and in so doing he focuses on the production of new literary forms from within the unequal literary field. In his preface to the reissue of The Way of the World, Moretti (2000b) traces the beginnings of his engagement with evolutionary theory back to the second edition of Signs Taken for Wonders, specifically the final chapter entitled ‘On Literary Evolution’. It is here that Moretti establishes the analytical approach that becomes the focus of later works such as ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’: a literary-critical method that explores the evolution of a particular genre – the novel in ‘On Literary Evolution’; the detective story in ‘Slaughterhouse’ – freed from any notion of a pure, transcendental literary realm. This, I suggest, is a significant moment in Moretti’s work, since it is through these early engagements with evolutionary theory that we can, to a certain extent, disentangle his work from the transcendence implied by Casanova’s arguments concerning the literary field. For Moretti, the Darwinian model of evolution accounts for the random selection of variations within a species. In the case of genre, there is no Platonic ideal, no a priori transcendent form which texts attempt to emulate (cf. Moretti 2013: 77), and thus our attention is drawn not to the perfect realization of form or genre, but to that which does not conform to our expectations, to ‘odd

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arrangements and funny solutions’ (Moretti 1988: 278). This however suggests a tension in Moretti’s critical endeavour: on the one hand, a non-transcendental evolutionary model of literary history is a rejection of ideal forms; on the other, his work reclassifying the novel, the detective story, or the epic, for example, involves establishing the parameters of these very genres, outlining the general principles of their constitution and variation. Indeed, it is the problematic status of the particular in the work of Moretti that has troubled critics such as Jonathan Arac, who argues that distant reading assumes a concept of form understood as the generalizable element of literature (Arac 2002: 37). Indeed, ‘Slaughterhouse’ expressly makes this point: ‘form is precisely the repeatable element of literature: what returns fundamentally unchanged over many cases and many years’ (Moretti 2013: 86). Form designates the consistent element of literature across geography and time. Literary texts may well be unique in style and content and they may be original in the ways in which they respond to the immediate and particular political context of the author; however, in their formal aspect they contain a repeatable element that remains unchanged. Although Moretti expressly rejects the Platonic ideal in his discussion of form, Arac is right to point out the parallels between his formalism and Northrop Frye’s concept of the literary archetype (Arac 2002: 37). Archetypes by this account are not an a priori model that texts seek to approximate, but rather repeatable symbols that recur throughout literary texts and cultural myths, and as such ‘unify and integrate our literary experience’ (Frye 1957: 99). Moretti, Arac observes, takes forward Frye’s sense of the commonality and repeatability of archetypes in his characterization of form. However, what Arac overlooks is the corresponding connection with Jung. In Jung’s hands the archetype is defined as ‘essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear’ (Jung 1969: 5). Of course, Frye argues that the universality of literary archetypes is an effect of education and global media (Frye 1957: 99), rather than viewing them in psychoanalytic terms as ‘unconscious content’. However, what is significant in Jung is his emphasis on the way in which archetypes are ‘altered’ as they become realized in the conscious mind. In other words, archetypes repeat as both universal and specific forms. As they recur across diverse contexts and locations their particular form will take ‘colour from the individual consciousness in which they happen to appear’. This is, as Goethe argued, the very function of world literature as the circulation of translated texts – translation is always the production of ‘something new’ (Goethe 1906: 209) because shared and universal

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myths and stories will be inflected by the particular language and context into which they are adapted. Understanding the role of this ‘unconscious content’, of that which escapes everyday comprehension and intelligibility, then, is an important aspect of world literature’s repeatability and, as we shall see in the remainder of this chapter, its creativity. While this argument is not antithetical to Moretti’s theory of form, it is an aspect of his theoretical work that at times he seeks to downplay. ‘Slaughterhouse’ acknowledges the unique features of the literary text, suggesting that we can find in Jane Eyre, for example, signs of contemporary political events that are specific to the text. Furthermore, the evolutionary model that extends from ‘On Literary Evolution’ to ‘Slaughterhouse’ pays close attention to the way in which literary forms diverge from one another, creating new formal patterns some of which may be selected as the progenitor of an entirely new subsection of the literary field. However, divergence and the creation of new forms are secondary to the principle of repeatability in Moretti’s evolutionary model when it comes to understanding how some literary forms come to be selected while others fall into obscurity. Distinguishing Darwinian from Lamarckian theories, Moretti insists that selection is governed by chance and necessity, rather than adaptation. The point at which new forms and genres emerge is unpredictable and determined by chance, however, the extent to which instances of divergence succeed or fail depends upon the relations of power that structure the society in which they emerge. Importantly, this does not involve a strictly linear temporal framework for understanding literary divergence, since the forms and devices that emerge through experimentation at one historical moment may be refunctionalized, and find greater success, at a later date. Yet success or failure is a mark of the dominant order, the extent to which the market selects one form over another as the fashion of the day. Success, in this evolutionary model, is a colonizing endeavour, eradicating competing authors or forms and becoming the template for future works. What is repeatable in literature, therefore, is determined by socio-economic context, since it is the latter that guarantees the success and longevity of form. Instances of innovation and originality within a popular generic tradition are not the sign of resistance to the social order: it is not ‘because of some intrinsic anarchic vocation of literature’ but rather, ‘in Darwinian fashion, the context can select forms – but it cannot generate them. Ruling forms, then, like ruling ideas, are not quite the forms of the ruling class: they are the forms the ruling class has selected – without having produced them’ (Moretti 1988: 266).

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By the time that we get to ‘Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur’ (2005), Moretti’s two models of world literature – evolution and world-system – seem diametrically opposed: one designates divergence, the other sameness. This seems an easy target, since it is obvious that, while common features are observable, literature is not simply the same in all contexts. And in order to address this, Moretti begins to outline a theory of diversity within the world-system. In the evolutionary model ‘new forms only arise by branching out from pre-existing ones via some kind of mutation’, he argues, ‘but what if the convergence of distinct lineages could also produce new forms?’ (Moretti 2013: 129). The answer to this question is an attempt to bring together elements of both evolutionary and world-systems theory, and it implicitly returns us to the Jamesonian theory of the novel that underpins ‘Conjectures’. Here, in ‘Evolution’, we are once again faced with a general theory of the novel, summarized as form from the core expressed through style from the periphery. In order for this to take place, those two elements – form and discourse, plot and style – must be disentangled. Plot travels, it is stable and consistent; style changes. But only ‘if diffusion intervenes, “moving” novels across the literary system’ (132). Diffusion here designates the homogenizing mechanism by which books from the core are exported and overdetermine the literary cultures of the peripheries. Yet, the result is not sameness, but ‘a hybrid form that does indeed “amalgamate different traditions”’ (134). Or, in the case of the novel, we can witness its emergence through ‘the encounter of Western forms and local reality’ producing ‘a structural compromise’ (54). Now part of the issue with this model is Moretti’s own admission in ‘Further Conjectures’ that critics such as Jonathan Arac (2002) and Jale Parla have persuasively demonstrated that ‘no novel or novelist […] does not betray the uneasiness of a formal compromise’ (Parla 2004: 120). In other words, the structure of diffusion in which the exported literatures from the core interfere and hamper the autonomous development of the periphery fails to recognize that ‘there is not one single literature which did not emerge through interference with a more established literature’ (Moretti cited in Even-Zohar 2013: 116). The imbalance of power between core and semi-/periphery does not hold in this case. As such, ‘the world-systems model maybe useful at other levels, but has no explanatory power at the level of form’ (116). This is a significant point to cede, since, as we have seen, the status of form as a generalizable, consistent and universal component of literary analysis is fundamental to Moretti’s approach to world literature. His solution is to distinguish between types of interference: ‘To recognize when a compromise occurs as it were under duress’ (117), which

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is to say that we must indeed pay attention to the socio-economic and political conditions under which interference occurs. Literary form, then, bears the sign of its constituent context: ‘if there is a strong, systematic constraint exerted by some literatures over the others […] then we should be able to recognize its effects within literary form itself’ (117). It will be evident, Moretti elaborates in ‘Evolution’, in the dissonance within texts: But for many of these texts, dissonance would be more precise than amalgamation: dissonance, disagreement, at times a lack of integration between what happens in the plot, and how the style evaluates the story, and presents it to the reader. Form as a struggle […]: a struggle between the story that comes from the core, and the viewpoint that ‘receives’ it in the periphery. That the two are not seamlessly fused is not just an aesthetic given, then, but the crystallization of an underlying political tension […] the endless spiral of hegemony and resistance created by world literature. (134)

This passage is significant for its turn towards both hegemony and resistance, an aspect of world literature which Moretti tends to downplay. It restates the polarization of core and periphery previously revised in light of Arac’s and Parla’s observations, but we might grant Moretti the point if we recognize that our focus here is on the texts which produce a notable dissonance, which experience literary interference under duress. This resolves, too, the problem I raised against the evolutionary model of ‘Slaughterhouse’: the assumption that context merely selects one form among others but cannot play a role in its production. Rather than operating as a consistent, fixed and unchanging universal, form takes on a dual aspect: it is at once, as it was in ‘Slaughterhouse’, ‘the repeatable element of literature’, that which ‘returns fundamentally unchanged over many cases and many years’ (86) and a constant variable, diversifying in relation to the specific contexts in which it emerges. It is, as Jung claimed of the archetype, a universal concept, common to all, which is ‘altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear’ (Jung 1969: 5). Aesthetics and politics converge in this account of world literature. The diversity and homogeneity of the world literary space reflects the innovation and constraints placed upon literary production both aesthetic (literary tradition) and economic/political (market pressures, political imperatives). No literary culture is wholly autonomous and free from interference, but some experience these pressures more pointedly than others. Form is a struggle between the

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assimilatory pressures of the core and the expression of resistance to that pressure in the periphery. That strikes me as a more convincing account of postcolonial literature, most notably the genre of writing back, than a world-systems model driven by a concept of sameness. Rather both diversity and sameness have a significant role to play. Moretti goes too far, I would argue, in ‘Evolution’, by posing a historical model in which sameness and diversity are consigned to distinct epochs, modern and premodern respectively. In doing so, he condemns contemporary and postcolonial literatures to sameness and, more significantly, obscures the apparently ‘endless spiral of hegemony and resistance created by world literature’. However, as Moretti maps this spiral it would seem that it is only in the periphery where the struggle between style and content is most pronounced (dissonant) that resistance is possible, a claim that is confirmed in Modern Epic. Moreover, it is difficult to see how distant reading can produce anything other than an account of the hegemonic structure of world literature and the world-system, while close reading emerges as the revolutionary vanguard by identifying the oddities and inconsistencies that point to the formal and political resistances crystalized in texts. Resistance remains under theorized within Moretti’s work, even while it is necessary as a way beyond the impasse of ‘The Soul and the Harpy’, in which, as we shall see, the function of literature is to secure consent. Contrary to Moretti’s historical division between premodern diversity and modern sameness, I suggest that a theory of world literature must indeed maintain the validity of both aspects and that they are not mutually exclusive. We have already seen how the two sides of form – that which is repeatable and that which is unique – function in tandem in the concept of the archetype. But we need not depend on a psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious to make that point. In Moretti we find a theory of the unceasing variation between hegemony and resistance; a concept of form that encompasses both constancy and specificity, sameness and diversity; a literary history that is a return to the past in order to uncover potential pathways not taken, devices and genres ready to be repurposed; and a view of literature that restores the link between aesthetics and politics without reductively conflating the two. These are important contributions to a theory of world literature in the aftermath of postcolonialism, but they are also consistent with an extant theory of literature: Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature, or more specifically their claim that any text can be both major and minor, at the same time. The crucial difference is, however, that for Deleuze and Guattari it is precisely in the moments of variation that literature is both political and resistant, and that this constitutes

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the shared condition of all literatures. As will be discussed in Chapter Three, the philosophy of Deleuze holds out the possibility of aesthetic innovation without telos, as Moretti’s evolutionary theory also proposes, but without implicating an a priori social field or reducing literature to epiphenomenon. Indeed, the three philosophical perspectives traced throughout this book – those of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière – share these fundamental claims. Together, these philosophers of immanence provide the basis of a theory of world literature in which literary texts form part of a web of relations, of connections, appropriations and resistances made between forces, as the constant creation and recreation of the social. It is a theory, moreover, that maintains that each text necessarily is the potential for a new social configuration and of dissent; that, in Deleuzian terms, all texts are at once major and minor. Mapping the distinction between close and distant reading offered in ‘Conjectures’ onto Moretti’s evolutionary model suggests that what is unique in a text can be uncovered by close reading and what is repeatable in a text can be observed through distant reading, as it is only at this level – the level of the epoch, of the world-system and longue durée (cf. Moretti 2013: 85–6) – that the repetition becomes visible. The implication here is that to uncover the oddities, deviations and idiosyncrasies within a form is to focus on what is unique not what is repeatable. It is to pursue a ‘close’ reading. Moreover, it is only by focusing on the text’s singularity that we escape the imperialism of the dominant context: what is repeatable (form) is repeatable only to the extent that it succeeds as a device or genre, a success that is the measure of its market value or capacity to perform a social function within the dominant order. Close readers, rather than distant readers, are the real revolutionaries. That statement, of course, stands against other moments in ‘On Literary Evolution’, ‘Conjectures’ and ‘Slaughterhouse’ where Moretti advocates the ‘Anarchy’ (2013: 89) of his approach to literary history, dismisses the narrowness of national literatures and promotes the study of ‘works of bricolage […] – not of engineering. The products of chance, not of design’ (1988: 278). There is much to be gained through Moretti’s recognition of the colonizing dimension of literary traditions, in his determination to offer a non-Platonic account of forms and in his focus on the diversity of the literary field. However, the logic of his evolutionary theory of literature leads us towards a recognition of the value of close reading as an activity of uncovering that which escapes capitalist commodification, while simultaneously sowing the seeds of suspicion that world literature read through the lens of distant reading will always be complicit with what Moretti elsewhere terms a rhetoric of innocence.

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The rhetoric of innocence In both models – evolutionary and world-system – literature is compromised by its relation to a more fundamental social structure. In the former, while Moretti escapes the transcendentalism of Platonic form through his development of a theory of literary archetypes, evolution in literary terms will always be driven by capitalist economics and the model will reach the limits of its usefulness when it comes to the problem of social conflict – form may be that which is repeatable in literature but Moretti refines that repeatability as a structural function in which literary form reflects the resolution of social conflict. The problem with the evolutionary model, and the reason that it cannot supplant world-systems theory as the basis for thinking through the problem of world literature, is an intractable one: ‘evolution has no equivalent for the idea of social conflict. Competition among organisms, or among similar species, yes […] but nothing like a conflict whose outcome may redefine the entire ecosystem’ (Moretti 2013: 122). As we have seen, divergence is produced either by chance or necessity, and successful divergences will be so because they are profitable or because they adequately address a social problem. This is Moretti’s critical endeavour from Signs Taken for Wonders to Distant Reading ‘in a nutshell, the idea […] that literary genres are problemsolving devices, which address a contradiction of their environment, offering an imaginary resolution by means of their formal organization’ (141). This, however, becomes especially problematic when that ‘resolution’ is aimed at the creation of consenting subjects, blind to the violence that underpins their society. When it comes to world-systems theory, on the other hand, literature (or specifically literary form) is a response to the contradictions and imbalances of a particular sociopolitical environment but it is not, as it is in the works of philosophers such as Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, as we shall see in later chapters, the active reconstitution of the social in which hitherto silenced actors might be heard. For Moretti, literature is not inherently a tool for the enforcement of consent to the dominant ideology of the capitalist world-system, but it has functioned as such since the advent of modernity. Indeed, in this respect, Moretti’s theory of world literature reproduces the temporal divide – in this case between premodern diversity and modern sameness – that can be found in the work of Casanova. This temporal break marks, for Moretti, the moment at which literature turned away from a dissident politics and became a rhetoric of innocence aimed at securing our consent to the global hierarchy. This position emerges early in his career in the first chapter of Signs Taken for Wonders, ‘The

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Soul and the Harpy’, in which literature is characterized as a branch of rhetoric in the (Aristotelian) sense that it is political (addressed to the social) and that it aims to persuade, or more specifically, that it attempts ‘to enlist support for a particular system of values’ (Moretti 1988: 3). As rhetoric and, thus, as persuasion, literature employs its devices in order to increase the transparency and, as such, efficacy of a dominant ideology. On the level of aesthetics, literature may be innovative and creatively pose new rhetorical forms; however, ‘this does not in the least “prove” […] that “real” literature is by its nature anti-conventional’ (7). Rejecting the notion that literature is necessarily a source of dissent is a significant point and, by aligning it with persuasion, Moretti is going further than like-minded critics such as WReC. However, in this moment he is suggesting that literature will always move from the pole of innovation towards that of the commonplace, and that the role of the literary critic is to trace a sociology of literary forms as they consolidate and even form the dominant values system: [Rhetoric] bears witness to a society divided, in conflict. […] Rhetorical ‘daring’ testifies to a will that wants to overturn the power relations of the symbolic order. ‘Commonplaces’ and semantic inertia, for their part, are the potential result of that daring no less than its opposite. […] It is no longer a question, then, of contrasting rhetorical (or ideological) ‘consent’ with aesthetic ‘dissent’, but of recognizing that there are different moments in the development of every system of consent, and above all different ways of furthering it. (8)

Literature, in other words, can be witness to and, indeed, instrument of the conflicts between new and old, innovative and commonplace, radical and conservative in both the aesthetic sphere, where new rhetorical forms reveal a will to challenge the accepted conventions of the ‘symbolic order’, and in the social sphere, where literature represents social conflicts in order to, if not resolve them, at least facilitate an acceptance of their intractability and thus to accept the world as it is. However, in the shift traced in ‘The Soul and the Harpy’, modern literature, literature of the capitalist world-system, is above all else a way of furthering the system of consent – literature’s rhetorical function, so to speak. Jacobean tragedy, for Moretti, marks the moment in literary history witness to the shift from dissent to consent – the last instance in which literature produced dissent by discrediting the concept of absolute monarchy and paving the way for the English Revolution. Tragedy, according to Moretti, ‘belongs to a world that does not yet recognize the inevitability of permanent conflict between opposing and immitigable interests or values, and therefore does not feel any need to

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confront the problem of reconciling them’ (28).18 The premodern world, then, is characterized by the acceptance of a hierarchical relationship of dominance and the subordination of opposed values. ‘Its “tragic” quality does not lie (as it would now be the case for us) in the fact that the story eventually leads to the sacrifice of one of the two values in conflict […] [but] in the fact that it has been possible to imagine, and put into words, an irreconcilable conflict’ (28). Premodern tragedy is ‘an unrivalled instrument of criticism and dissent’ (29) because of its capacity to imagine, at the same time, the world as it ‘should be’ (28) – in other words, the world in which the rightful hierarchy is secured (the resolution of the tragedy) – and (in its tragic moment) the world refigured as an irreconcilable conflict between opposed values. To be sure, the plot will always resolve itself in the triumph of one value over the other and the reconstitution of a just order, however, its tragic quality, as well as its capacity for criticism and dissent, stems from the possibilities of imagining a world as the perpetual conflict of irreconcilable forces. Modern literary forms, by contrast, ‘[see] conflict as a given fact in society’ but are aligned with the aim ‘of showing that mutually opposing values and interest can always reach, if not a genuine conciliation, at least some kind of coexistence and compromise’ (29). It is this ‘anti-tragic impulse’ of modernity that lies behind, in philosophical terms, the emergence of an aesthetic sphere, which was unthinkable in a premodern society that ‘did not recognize aesthetic activity as having any autonomy, but believed it should always cooperate directly, immediately, in moral or cognitive purposes’ (28). In aesthetic terms, premodern literature posits a direct correlation between literature and the world, between representation and reality, while modernity witnesses the advent of a relatively autonomous aesthetic sphere. In social terms, another split has been established: between a premodern world of opposed values that need no mediation or resolution because a relation of dominance will necessarily assert itself and a modern world in which conflict tends towards some form of compromise. If that account of Moretti’s aesthetic theory sounds familiar, given the discussion of Casanova above, it is precisely because he too grounds his theory of modern literature in a historical break that distinguishes between modern and premodern forms. And in doing so, he too becomes a thinker of modern critique, as Bruno Latour would define it. After Latour, Moretti’s work can be read as following suit in the wake of Kant’s Copernican revolution, and, indeed, both Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man are central points of reference in section four, ‘Literature, Consent’, of ‘The Soul and the Harpy’.

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As will be discussed in Chapter Two, Latour addresses the subject of Kant’s philosophy by means of a critique of the temporal break instituted by theories of modernity (as in the case of Kant for Latour and, for the postcolonial scholar engaging with theories of world literature, in the case of Casanova and Moretti) and as an alternative philosophical model for an aesthetics of relation and of dissent. Latour positions himself against Kant precisely for the same reasons that Moretti employs him to delineate the modern from the premodern: in Kant we find the formalization of an aesthetic sphere distinct from that of scientific inquiry; a division between judgements of fact from value judgements; and, to turn to his wider philosophy, between phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. PostKantian philosophy, Latour argues, has maintained this dualistic separation of spheres while continually searching for methods to mediate between the two; in that sense, Hegelian dialectics is an amplified version of the Kantian separation of phenomenon and noumenon (cf. Latour 1993a: 56), as indeed is, as Fredric Jameson has argued, poststructuralism.19 In one respect, this is a foreshadowing of the a priori assumptions discussed above in relation to world-systems theory: as Jameson argues, in Kant ‘the separation of the mental processes from reality encourages an explicit search for the permanent structures of the mind itself, the organizational categories and forms through which the mind is able to experience the world, or to organize a meaning in what is essentially in itself meaningless’ (1974: 109). A Latourian perspective would resist a concept of modernity that makes structured opposition and its dialectical resolution the driving force of history. Kantian thought, for Latour, establishes a framework in which modernity is at once divided according to two distinct and irreducible spheres that, at the same time, are related. Indeed, Moretti acknowledges this much when he argues that ‘while capitalist society is unthinkable without the scientific and technical progress reflected in the separation of intellect and morality, it is equally unthinkable without the incessant attempt to annul that separation and remedy it, an attempt to which the extraordinary and apparently inexplicable proliferation of aesthetic activities that distinguishes capitalism bears witness’ (1988: 30–1). This is remarkably similar to Latour’s explanation of the efficacy of the modern world in We Have Never Been Modern: premodern cultures draw no distinction between reality and its representation, fact and fetish, of an aesthetic sphere apart from the social world; modernity, on the other hand, institutes these categories as separate spheres (what Latour [1993a] calls the work of purification) in order to distinguish themselves from premodern culture. That is what Latour refers to as the ‘Great Divide’ (1993a: 12): the break in the flow

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of time that establishes one side as modern and the other as not. To expand on this point, and looking ahead to Moretti’s later Modern Epic, while moderns can coexist alongside the premodern in a Blochian model of non-contemporaneity, they can do so only by inventing a paradoxical temporality in which history is conceived of as at once a rupture (the break between premodern and modern) and a teleological continuity in which the non-contemporaneous cultures of the world-system will inevitably progress towards modernity.20 In that sense, I argue, the compromise that Moretti identifies as the mark of modern literature and aesthetics is problematic: by structuralizing a break between premodern and modern, Moretti’s theory of literature, like that of Casanova, institutes a teleology by which the non-modern will necessarily, progressively modernize. That said, however, modernity’s separation of spheres is not dismissed by Latour in favour of a return to premodern indistinction: indeed, as Moretti argued, and Latour would agree, modernity has been remarkably successful because of its ability to both separate the scientific from the religious and the moral, and to overcome that separation. Modernity is effective because it allows both practices, but only as long as it considers them separately and as an irresolvable paradox. This is where Latour’s reading of post-Kantian philosophy resists Moretti’s account. Moretti can define modern literature as the reconciliation or compromise between conflicting values (a rhetoric of innocence) only by imagining literature as a third term mediating between, but never fully reconciling, two spheres: in Kantian terms, judgement as that which connects the spheres of nature and reason. For Latour, and others before him, that misses the wider significance of Kant’s philosophy and turns the philosopher that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche critiqued for too radical a separation of phenomena and the thing-in-itself into a philosopher of their relation.21 In order to understand Moretti’s particular take on Kant we need to return to the quotation noted above and extend it a little: The first function [of the aesthetic sphere] is that indicated by Kant’s aesthetics: to restore the connection between the world of judgements of fact and that of judgements of value by resisting scientific ‘disillusionment’ and instead satisfying that deep-seated need for ‘magic’, which is part and parcel of the desire to see values ‘rooted in facts’, thus avoiding responsibility for their partiality in the secure belief that they ‘stem’ from the very ‘reality of things’. (1988: 33)

This is a strongly Marxist reinterpretation of Kant’s philosophy. What Moretti finds in the restored connection between noumena and phenomena is not simply the intervention of aesthetics, but more specifically an idea of the commodity

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fetish: ‘The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production’ (Marx 1990: 169). It is difficult to grasp the relation that Moretti imagines between ‘scientific “disillusionment”’ and the ‘deep-seated need for “magic”’ on the one hand, and between magic and ‘facts’ or ‘the very “reality of things”’, on the other, without reflecting on the significance of Marx’s term for understanding the masking of social relations between people as a relation of material things. It is the latter that connects ‘magic’ and the ‘reality of things’, even while Kant’s philosophy alone leads us to consider the disjoint between an aesthetic realm of representation and that of reality. As Marx writes in Capital, ‘the mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’ (164–5), and thus ‘the definite social relation between men themselves […] assumes […] the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (165). There is, in other words, a masking or concealment at work in the commodity. In Latourian terms, when confronted with any given commodity we should, in principle, if we looked hard enough, be able to trace a whole network of actors whose labour went into its production, but the commodity itself bears no obvious trace of those relations and its exchange-value serves to obscure them by promoting an abstract notion of universal value.22 Masked are ‘the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects’ (168–9). Or, to return to Moretti, the ‘magic’ or fetishistic aspect of the commodity connects it to a material reality of objects rather than one of social relations. We can begin to see the deception which allows Moretti to present literature as the harpy, in whose clutches the soul ‘does not lower its gaze’, preferring ‘to delude itself about the affectionate, almost maternal nature of the creature dragging it away with her in flight’ (Moretti 1988: 41). As David Harvey notes in his reading of Capital, Marx reveals that ‘we are perpetually at risk of being ruled by fetishistic constructs that blind us to what is actually happening’ (2010: 47). It explains too the correlation between literature as consent, proposed in ‘The Soul and the Harpy’, and the rhetoric of innocence, which Moretti sets out in Modern Epic. His contention that lo real maravilloso is best understood not as ‘magical realism’, but rather as ‘marvellous reality. Not a poetics – a state of affairs’ (Moretti 1996: 234), is much more than a matter of refining an awkward translation of Alejo Carpentier’s original formulation (cf. Carpentier 1995). It is telling that Moretti is less concerned with the nuances of ‘magic’ versus ‘marvellous’, despite

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the latter signalling Carpentier’s troubled association with surrealism. Rather, it is the status of the real that is at issue in this generic classification: not a poetics, not realism as the representation of a particular society or event, but reality. In Marxist terms, the commodity fetish (magic) is not mere illusion; it is a state of affairs, but one which masks the actual social relations that give rise to it. Its reality is one of material relations between individuals rather than social relations between them. And in Moretti’s case study of marvellous reality, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, what is masked are the profound structural inequalities produced by the social relations of individuals within the capitalist world-system, or, in other words, combined and uneven development. Understanding magical or marvellous reality as the literary expression of the commodity fetish helps to explain Moretti’s claim that in One Hundred Years of Solitude ‘the true magic of this novel is not magic: it is technology’ (249), not flying carpets, ascending virgins, or lonely ghosts, but ice, pianolas, magnets, and the spy-glass. The novel, Moretti argues, presents magic as the products of Western modernity and thus as that which ‘belongs to the future’ (249) of those who lag behind in the temporal ordering of modernity in the periphery and semi-periphery of the world-system. The masking or duplicity of Márquez’s magical reality, then, lies in its ability to confront the Western reader with the ‘Weberian side of [their own] existence […]. Nothing frightening, in the products of Western technology. They seem a game. A fantastic present sent from Europe to that faraway village: truly, a marvellous reality. […] A rhetoric of innocence’ (250). A fetishization, in Marx’s sense, of the commodity disguises the real social relations between workers as a relation of benign material objects. This returns us to Moretti’s Kantian claim that ‘while capitalist society is unthinkable without the scientific and technical progress reflected in the separation of intellect and morality, it is equally unthinkable without the incessant attempt to annul that separation and remedy it’ (1988: 30–1): magical or marvellous reality becomes the literary expression of the attempt to ‘annul that separation’ of practical and pure reason, of reality and the magical, in the service of obscuring the social relations of capitalist economic production. Understood in this way, the rhetoric of innocence should become the focus of postcolonial critique. If Moretti’s reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, or perhaps more accurately, the reception of Márquez’s novel in the West, is correct, then it can be extended within the context of a contrapuntal reading that reveals the hidden subtexts within the narrative as that which betrays the workings of capitalism. We can argue this point if we consider the way in which he aligns

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the rhetoric of innocence with imperialist expansion earlier in Modern Epic. It is, he argues, a function of the colonial imagination to be at once ‘proud of its own world domination’ and at the same time blind ‘to the violence sustaining it’ (1996: 26). In Robinson Crusoe, for example, ‘Crusoe saves Friday from the cannibalism of other natives; Lord Jim protects the village of Doramin from Ali’s rascally attacks; Passepartout and Phileas Fogg save Aouda from the “barbarous custom” of suttee’, and of particular significance is the way in which ‘all these works contemplate a marriage between the Westerner and the Native Woman: for, in marriage, conquest becomes consent and is thus fully legitimized’ (27). Here Modern Epic’s rhetoric of innocence corresponds precisely with the claim of ‘The Soul and the Harpy’: literature’s function is to secure consent. The rhetoric of innocence is ‘a strategy of denial and disavowal’ (25), a displacement of the violence and exploitation that make possible capitalist modernity, and, in that sense, it is an instrument of consent: it aims ‘to make individuals feel “at ease” in the world they happen to live in, to reconcile them in a pleasant and imperceptible way to its prevailing cultural norms’ (Moretti 1988: 27). This is literature’s worldly effect. At the same time, I would add, this drive also creates a narrative of consenting subjects: in the case of the novels noted above, the marriage plot is expressly a scene of consent and thus justifies the imperialist’s intervention. We can extend this motif by suggesting that imperialism creates a similar narrative through the representation not merely of expressed consent (in the case of the marriage scene) but of assumed tacit consent: as Spivak’s analysis of sati, or in early colonial history, suttee, revealed, ‘one never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice consciousness’, only the colonial view – ‘a case of “White men saving brown women from brown men”’ – or that of the traditional patriarchy – ‘“The women wanted to die”’ (Spivak 2010: 50). British and Indian perspectives here both assume the women’s tacit consent to a particular social order, one colonial, the other traditional. As a result, we need not rely on the presence of a legal ceremony in which consent is expressly offered. Rather, it is a function of the colonial imagination, and indeed the traditional patriarchal one, to present the reader with a cast of characters whom consent, whether expressly or tacitly, to the dominant order. Broadly, then, this maps onto Moretti’s account of modern aesthetics in ‘The Soul and the Harpy’: premodern literature offered a genuinely tragic vision insofar as it stemmed from a society which accepted an organic social order (the divine right of kings, for example) but in its moment of tragedy it imagined ‘an irreconcilable conflict’ of two opposed values (Moretti 1988: 28). Tragedy

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created uncertainty, staging the possibility that one value system could be faced with its negation and that one side would triumph over another. For this reason, it was ‘an unrivalled instrument of criticism and dissent’ (29). Modern aesthetics, on the other hand, is fundamentally anti-tragic since it no longer holds out the possibility that one set of values can triumph completely over another. Moretti’s argument here is essentially dialectical: in the premodern era, tragedy was the dialectical negation of the dominant order and as such it resolved itself in the reassertion of one set of values conceived of as an organic (or divine) order. What distinguishes modernity, then, is a shift from Hegelian to Marxist dialectics: the modern world disregards the concept of totality and dialectics proceeds by means of a constant adjustment between two opposed sides that cannot be resolved in a final synthesis.23 The primary function of modern aesthetics then is to enact this unending dialectical process by which the reader is confronted with two opposed values not as the possibility of an alternative social order, but as the grounds for a coexistence and compromise between the two. I argue, however, that this in itself is a masking because, as is evident from the colonial examples above, it only appears as if coexistence and compromise has been achieved because of the tacit or express articulation of consent (an agreement to compromise), but when we look a little closer at the social relations at work within a particular scene of domination we discover the silencing or omissions enforced in order to make this possible: a rhetoric of innocence that convinces us that the subaltern cannot speak. But this leaves us with a conceptual problem: if, as Spivak implies, the work of postcolonial critique is turned towards the silences, gaps and omissions in the historical document and in literature in order to reveal that which has been silenced or masked, then can it really do so without simply co-opting the subaltern voice into its own rhetoric of innocence? Moretti’s account, while not expressly dealing with postcolonialism, would suggest that it cannot. Spivak herself was wary of intellectuals who purport to represent the dispossessed and yet still argued that ‘intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society’s other’ (1999: 249). Modernity, for Spivak, as much as it is for Moretti or, as we shall see in Chapter Two, Latour, is too heterogeneous a network to be reducible ‘to a coherent narrative’ (249), to a single, organic or divine order of things, but as such ‘persistent critique is needed’ (249). Moretti, on the other hand, makes dissent and criticism a premodern activity: critique as the work of troubling and questioning the organic order, making an audience ill at ease with society. In the absence of the organic order, of an assumed totality in Hegelian terms, critique is no longer possible and the best that we can do as dissidents is to confront one system of values with another and wish for an

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impossible compromise. The closest approximation of critique in the moment of modernity, then, is the staging of opposed values or world views in the hope that a satisfactory mediation between the two can be achieved. Moretti has presented us with a rather idiosyncratic reading of Kant in order to get us to this point. Broadly speaking, Kant establishes a framework for conceiving of modernity as a persistent tension between two incommensurable spheres, best formulated in his premise of the two ontological categories noumena and phenomena, the inaccessible, pure thing-in-itself and the empirical world that we experience. He then introduces a third term, judgement, to connect these two aspects and how successful that bridging has been is a matter of philosophical debate.24 Moretti, as noted above, follows contemporary thinkers such as Latour, for whom Kant can be read as instituting a paradox in which the ontological condition of the world is one which is both split into two incommensurable categories and, at the same time, mediated by a third term – aesthetics – that connects them. If we take up Moretti’s characterization of the mediation of aesthetics between these two categories as connected to ‘that deepseated need for “magic”’ (1988: 33), then we can say both that aesthetics takes on the role of the commodity fetish (as argued above) and that, as a result, it only appears to mediate between the two categories. Once again, this is not to say that the commodity fetish or aesthetics are merely illusion: by this account, they are the signs of a particular relation of objects, just not of the actual social relations that constitute them. In other words, there is always something else going on, something other which is not visible, and as such aesthetics can only appear to mediate between a divide that it cannot actually annul. Thus, in Moretti’s words, the first function of aesthetics is to satisfy the ‘deep-seated need for “magic”’ because we ‘desire to see values “rooted in facts”’, to believe ‘that they “stem” from the “very reality of things”’, and as such avoid confronting ‘their partiality’ (33). If Kant were to successfully bridge the dual categories then everything would be at once noumenon and phenomenon, real and representation, and thus to explain a thing only in terms of the latter would be a partial account. Modern thinking employs aesthetics to generate consent, to reconcile us to the paradox of Kant’s ontological split, by creating the appearance of coexistence and of mediation between the two even while it stems only from one part of reality, be it the reality of material relations between objects rather than social relations between individuals for Marx, or, from a Kantian perspective, the reality that we experience rather than the pure thing-in-itself. For those who read Kant’s third Critique in a favourable light, as achieving an account of a dual ontology that is at the same time relational, the primary motivation for this manoeuvre is to

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show that individuals can intervene and act in the empirical world.25 Aesthetic judgement is the primary means for achieving this since its counterpart, teleological judgement, is determined by ‘pre-established […] rules, supplied by understanding or reason’ (Hughes 2010: 19). Aesthetic judgement is ‘the power of judgement […] exercised in an autonomous form, detached from specific aims or objectives’ (151); distinct, in other words, from judgement governed by reason. Freed from reason or pre-established rules, aesthetic judgement, as Hughes argues, ‘preserves a capacity to access aspects of the world, normally lost, or at least, hidden in everyday life’ (150); it opens our minds ‘to the possibilities of a phenomenon without our trying to explain it’ (21). Only aesthetic judgement allows us to experience the working of pure reason. This leaves us with a very different account of aesthetics than can be found in Moretti: the function of the aesthetic sphere is to provoke contemplation, which can take the form of either aesthetic or teleological judgement, or by Hughes’s reading will proceed from a primary condition of aesthetic judgement (revealing the workings of judgement in-itself) to a secondary moment in which judgement is governed by practical reason (cf. Hughes 2010: 23–5). We cannot say that in this primary moment the aesthetic sphere is intended to achieve any aim whatsoever. Moreover, freed from pre-established norms and understanding, aesthetic judgement operates for Kant, Hughes argues, through ‘the transfigurative power of the imagination that takes up something we apprehend and finds in it much more than might initially be evident at the level of appearance’ (11). Even when faced with conflict or disharmony (the Kantian sublime), ‘we discover an alternative power, the capacity as rational beings to think beyond the sphere of sensible experience’ (14). Hughes paints Kant as a philosopher who found in art the stimulus for mental activity and imagination freed from established norms and reason. As such, it allows us to access that which is masked by everyday life or, to return to terms used above, concealed by the ‘magic’ of the commodity fetish. We might say that Moretti has offered one interpretation of Kant’s notoriously difficult philosophy, and Hughes another. We might add that even Moretti felt the need to move beyond Kant and incorporate aspects of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in order to show fully how aesthetics becomes an instrument of consent. However, Moretti has left us with a number of unsatisfactory propositions, in my view: a literary history which reproduces a temporal break between premodern and modern regimes; which makes modernity incapable of a critical interrogation of the existing hegemony, only able to pose alternative world views in the hope that the compromise will settle on a better system; and

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which charges literature with the wholly conservative function of reconciling us to that compromise. It is not my intention to settle the conflicting accounts of Kant offered by Moretti and Hughes, but I do want to pick up on a nuance that gestures towards the philosophers whose works inform later chapters  – Nietzsche, Latour, Deleuze and Rancière. Each philosopher, while resisting totality and the predominance of dialectical thinking, especially dialectical negation, introduces an aspect of otherness into their thought, an otherness that is understood not as an inaccessible realm apart but, in the Spinozian sense, as one side of a dual reality. Moreover, each uses this ‘other’ as the basis for theorizing the emergence of newness, creativity and dissident alternatives to the existing hegemony. When viewed from this perspective, the work of literature and, indeed, literary criticism, postcolonial or otherwise, can become a process of recreating or exposing the production of a rhetoric of innocence, of highlighting the obscured relations at work within the text. Such an act, however, need not be thought of as one, strictly, directed at the revelation of an unconscious ‘truth’ or submerged, primary reality. Indeed, for Latour and post-critical thinkers inspired by his work, such as Rita Felski, this is precisely what critique should stop doing. Rather, to repurpose Moretti, literature has the capacity to imagine an alternative society not as the dialectical negation of the present one, but as its creative refiguring: as making visible that which has been made invisible, heard what was silenced and, as such, bringing to light the immanent possibilities of new social formations. This is the dissident function of what Deleuze and Guattari call minor literature, or Rancière dissensus, a capacity that resides in all literature as the uncovering of that which resists comprehension, which escapes us, or is in excess of everyday reality. World-systems theory in the hands of Franco Moretti holds out some intriguing possibilities for scholars of world literature and postcolonialism alike: he draws attention to the Kantian foundations of literary history, explores the implications of combined and uneven development for the peripheries and sets out the conditions for literary dissent, albeit relegated to the premodern period. As I have argued, however, both Moretti’s evolutionary model, which foregrounds innovation in literary form as a function akin to Frye’s archetype, and his worldsystems approach, in which literature is characterized as an instrument for consent, can be revised if we reconsider the philosophical relation between the two sides of a dual reality implicit in his argument. In the case of magical realism, and I would suggest, literature in general, its dissident possibilities come to the fore when each is viewed as a genuine, rather than merely simulated, mediation

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between the two, immanent sides of a single reality. Márquez’s magical realism, as Fredric Jameson has argued, exposes rather than contributes to a rhetoric of innocence that condemns continents to their solitude: the massacre of the banana company workers in One Hundred Years of Solitude is ‘successfully, magically and yet naturally […] eradicated from the collective memory in that archetypal repression which allows all of us to survive history’s immemorial nightmares, to live on happily despite “the slaughterhouse of history” (Hegel). This is the realism – yes, even the political realism – of magical realism’ (Jameson 2017: 23). For Jameson, the realism of magical realism is the novel’s capacity to expose the illusions which blind us to the Weberian violence that underpins our world. Márquez’s text enacts the processes by which a rhetoric of innocence is created, in this case the collective amnesia of the state-sponsored massacre of Columbian workers, and as such we cannot fail to be aware of the repression at work in our narrative of civilization. By revealing the ways in which a state of affairs comes to be what it is, the text always holds out the possibility that it might have been or might yet become something very different: José Arcadio Segundo’s memory of the slaughter (only one of two who remember it) or our own awareness of the repressed memory of events might contain the potential seed of an alternative history, one that recovers what was silenced – the subaltern perspective. This is the work of minor literature in Deleuzian terms: recreating the processes of becoming that lie behind all established forms and identities, and as such maintaining the potential that they can become something very different. Deleuze can make this claim because of his dual ontology: a single reality that is at once actual and virtual, caught in a continual movement from one to the other. That each identity or thing is at once actual and virtual gives it the capacity to become new in a flight from the fixed hierarchies of this world; and so it is for literature. This capacity for dissent, I maintain, is essential if world literature and its critical analysis is to become anything more than the passive reflection of a world of global inequalities. With these issues in mind we will turn in this final section to Roberto Bolaño’s confessional narrative of post-dictatorship Chile.

Literature as discontent: Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile A writer whose work has been read, in Benjaminian terms, as a document of barbarism, Roberto Bolaño would seem well placed as a postcolonial and world writer of works that testify to what Moretti refers to as the Weberian side of

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our existence and a world of perpetual conflict.26 Indeed, his first work to be translated into English and, thus, arguably, to enter into circulation as world literature, By Night in Chile, presents us with a protagonist, Father Urrutia, whose deathbed confession reflects on a lifetime of naïve complicity with Chile’s governing and literary elites, such that the book itself can be read as Urrutia’s own rhetoric of innocence. In this case, the priest can be regarded as ‘the soul of the [not yet] deceased’, ‘doing nothing to get out of the harpy’s clutch’, ‘rest[ing] its head trustingly on the harpy’s arms’ (Moretti 1988: 41). Spanning the decades of Allende-Pinochet era, the novella exposes Urrutia’s culpability as an instrument of state terror as he undertakes the task of teaching Marxism to Pinochet and the military junta, and attends parties with Chile’s literary elite where, in the basement below, the military police are torturing political prisoners. As a rhetoric of innocence, the narrative is Urrutia’s ‘strategy of denial and disavowal – a projection of violence outside [him]self ’ (Moretti 1996: 25). He claims to ‘take responsibility for [his] actions’, and maintains that he is ‘responsible in every way’ (2009a: 1); ‘My aim is not to stir up conflict, it never has been, my aims are peace and responsibility for one’s action, for one’s words and silences’ (2). But such aims are constantly thwarted by ‘the slanderous rumours the wizened youth spread in a single storm-lit night to sully my name’ (1) as well as by the narrative itself which exposes his wilful ignorance of the dark side of Chilean society. Therefore, as López-Vicuña has argued, Bolaño’s novels can be read as ‘a testimony of the profound discontent or unease in our civilization’ (López-Vicuña 2009: 156). This unwitting gesture towards Moretti’s ‘The Soul and the Harpy’, in which the ‘substantial function of literature is to […] make individuals feel “at ease” in the world they happen to live in’ (Moretti 1988: 27), suggests something of the great distance between Moretti and postcolonial writing on the matter of literature’s worldly ‘function’. Bolaño implies that literature ‘is profoundly marked by the barbarism of the present: it cannot escape it, nor can it detach itself or constitute itself into a privileged, safe, or civilized space’ (López-Vicuña 2009: 156). This evokes, for us, not only the conservative function ascribed to literature by Moretti, but also Casanova’s literary republic as a realm apart, as well as their problematization of the close association of literature and politics, especially in postcolonial contexts. As will be discussed in the remainder of this chapter, Urrutia attempts to escape political turmoil by fleeing into the ‘safe, civilized space’ of his library, convinces himself that he is attempting to contribute to the preservation of church buildings and that he has no choice but to offer classes on Marxism to General Pinochet. However, at each

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stage the novel undermines his pretensions. Urrutia’s attempts to console himself are challenged by a narrative that creates a sense of underlying discontent and unease, and as such far from promoting a rhetoric of innocence it ironizes the very attempt at expressing one. This, then, is the dissident, radical potential of By Night in Chile. As the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group argued in their ‘Founding Statement’, against the backdrop of displaced revolutionary projects and the uneven process of redemocratization in the aftermath of authoritarian regimes across Latin America, there is a pressing need ‘for new ways of thinking and acting politically’ (1993: 110), of an engagement with subaltern actors as agents capable of producing ‘social effects that are visible, if not always predictable or understandable’ (111–12). Through its ironic portrayal of Urrutia alongside notable figures of Chile’s literary elite, such as Pablo Neruda, Salvador Reyes Figueroa and Herman Diaz Arrita, the literary critic who wrote under the pseudonym Alone (fictionalized in Bolaño’s text as the character Farewell), By Night in Chile creates resistance to a hegemonic paradigm of the national narrative. In other words, Bolaño exposes the complicity of the rhetoric of innocence as it perpetuates a dominant nationalist narrative by drawing attention to the gaps and silences that lie behind Urrutia’s confession, or in the words of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, the ‘fissures in the forms of hierarchy and hegemony’ (111) that trouble such rhetoric. Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix is regarded as a fictionalized Ignacio Valente (the penname of José Miguel Ibánez Langlois), an Opus Dei priest who was close to the Pinochet regime, author of a critique of Marxism, and a literary critic who wrote for El Mercurio.27 From the outset of the novella, this figure of high culture and member of Chile’s literati is exposed as subscribing to elitist views of his vocation. Under Farewell’s guidance, Urrutia proclaims that ‘nothing on earth could be more fulfilling than to read, and to present the results of my reading in good prose’ (2009a: 4), and imagines ‘that estate where the critic’s path was indeed strewn with roses, where knowing how to read was valued, and where taste was more important than practical necessities and obligations’ (5). The irony is that Urrutia is a very poor reader: when he is commissioned by Mr Raef and Mr Etah to undertake a trip to Europe in order to document the preservation of churches he notes his misgivings about their purpose, suggesting that in their letter to him there was something concealed, an ‘invisible letter, more serious in content’ (73). What he fails to see is that Mr Raef and Mr Etah are anagrams of fear and hate, and behind their project concerning the conservationist practices of the church lies a damning indictment of its complicity with twentieth-century fascism.28

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As part of his research, Urrutia soon discovers that ‘the principal threat to the major examples of Romanesque and Gothic architecture was pollution caused not by humans but by animals, specifically pigeon shit’ (69), and that falconry is the chief defence employed by the priests. During his tour of Europe, Urrutia witnesses the preservation work of Father Pietro in the Italian city of Pistoia, which has been so successful that he has cleared the city of pigeons, a fact that few citizens seem happy about: ‘The window of a council flat opened and an old woman shouted something and shook her fist at us’ (70). Indeed, other priests, such as Father Antonio in Burgos, have abandoned the practice ‘partly because […] the priest had begun to have doubts about using such an expeditive method to be rid of birds which, in spite of their shitting, were God’s creatures too’ (73): ‘it’s true they protect churches from the corrosive and, in the long term, destructive effects of pigeon shit, but one mustn’t forget that pigeons or doves are the earthly symbol of the Holy Spirit’ (74). This association of imagery between the pigeon and the dove, as well as the discontentment of the people against the activities of the church, recurs in his most dramatic encounter with falconry near the Church of St Peter and St Paul in the French town of Saint Quentin: The pigeon, struck by Fever [the priest’s falcon], fell from the sky, and a murmur of surprise came from the main square of Saint Quentin, and Fr Paul and I, rather than beating a hasty retreat, left the church and walked towards the main square, and there was the pigeon, a white dove, bleeding on to the paving stones, and a crowd of people standing around it, […] the pigeon killed by Fever was the mascot for an athletic competition, and the athletes were visibly displeased or perturbed, likewise the local society ladies, who had sponsored the race and proposed the idea of opening the proceedings by releasing a dove, and the local communists were displeased too, since they had supported the ladies’ proposal, although for them that dove, now dead but flying free just a moment before, did not symbolize the peaceful sublimation of rivalry in sport, for them it was Picasso’s dove, a bird with a double meaning. (77–8)

For Father Antonio, the dove symbolizes the Holy Spirit, the sign of the renewed covenant and of peace; for the communists it is Picasso’s dove, a reference to the lithograph ‘Dove’ which featured on the poster advertising the communistsupported Peace Congress held in Paris, 1949. An official member of the French Communist Party at this time, Picasso’s black and white image of a dove (actually a Milanese pigeon), evokes both peace and communist ideals.29 As Roland Penrose writes, it has become ‘a time-honoured symbol of peace’ and has ‘been reproduced on postage stamps in China and other communist countries’ (1981: 366–7). Yet the

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image signifies more specially pacifism and stands alongside a number of works during this period in which Picasso took up anti-war themes: addressing the third Peace Congress in Sheffield, 1950, he declared ‘I stand for life against death: I stand for peace against war’ (Picasso cited in Penrose 1981: 368).30 It is unlikely that Urrutia would have recalled Picasso’s dove without also bringing to mind his most famous work Guernica (1937), the artist’s response to the destruction of the Basque town by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War. ‘Picasso’s dove’ has more connotations than Urrutia intuits, signifying not only opposition to war but also resistance to fascism in particular, a significant omission given the priest’s later involvement with Pinochet’s dictatorship. Indeed, whereas Picasso during an address to the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace held in August 1948 in Wroclaw, Poland, proclaimed his support for the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda who was at that time persecuted by the state (cf. Hensbergen 2004: 198), Urrutia consistently fails to confront fascism. For Urrutia, Neruda is a poet of a rarefied realm, whom he encounters at Farewell’s estate ‘addressing the minerals of the earth, and the stars, whose nature we can only know by intuition’ (Bolaño 2009a: 13). He is a poet of the elements, associated with ‘the obscure dignity of our land’ (12), but detached from the everyday realities of the peasants who live on the estate. Urrutia evokes notions of a pure, ‘elemental’ (12) literary realm untouched by political concerns, against which the text offers Picasso as an example of an artist whose work has become a symbol of anti-war and anti-fascist resistance. Indeed, the novella repeats this gesture in its fictionalized account of Ernst Jünger who helps an unnamed Guatemalan painter living in Paris during the Nazi occupation: as López-Vicuña argues, ‘the mention of Jünger is significant, as he was a writer who, in spite of his conservative ideas, opposed the Nazi regime and, during his time in Paris under the Vichy regime, protected left-wing artists such as Picasso’ (2009: 161). These allusions together create a counternarrative of anti-fascism, an ‘invisible’ narrative, ‘more serious in content’ (Bolaño 2009a: 73), which Urrutia is blind to and which makes both him and the Catholic Church complicit with its target. By killing the dove, a symbol of peace, the Holy Spirit and resistance to twentieth-century fascism, with their falcons the Catholic Church is characterized as detached from the people and more interested in its own preservation than resisting fascism. In that sense, its position echoes Farewell’s (the critic noted for his ‘falcon eyes’ [5]) and, by association, Urrutia’s own views that the privileged world of art, letters and architecture is one ‘where taste was more important than practical necessities and obligations’ (5). This disjoint between an aesthetic realm and a world of practical necessities belies the critique of Casanova’s world literary republic with which this chapter

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began. The structural division between a privileged, pure literary realm detached from the infringements of political, social and historical forces, on the one hand, and on the other, an overdetermined, unimaginative literature which, like all postcolonial literatures, by Casanova’s account, maintains too close a relationship to its sociopolitical context, is evoked by Bolaño’s novella, with Urrutia, like Casanova, favouring the former as the highest expression of literary value. ‘For Urrutia’, as López-Vicuña has argued, ‘literature transcends political differences, creating a privileged space that allows literary intellectuals to escape from the vulgarity of the world’ (2009: 161). However, Urrutia’s assumptions are continually found to be misplaced and, even, wilfully ignorant of the subtext which belies them. He gives classes on Marxism to General Pinochet and the military junta so that they can better understand their enemies, and attends parties hosted by the writer María Canales (a fictionalized Mariana Callejas) and her husband Jimmy Thompson who ‘had been one [of] the key agents of DINA, and […] had used his house as a centre for the interrogation of prisoners’ (Bolaño 2009a: 121).31 Urrutia’s protestation that ‘I would have been able to speak out, but I didn’t see anything, I didn’t know until it was too late’ (122) is, like that of María (‘We never heard anyone yell, the electricity just cut out and then came back’ [126]), a refusal to fully account for one’s complicity. Throughout, Urrutia demonstrates his wilful blindness to political violence: after his survey of European churches, he returns to Chile and the democratic election of Salvador Allende in September 1970: I went straight to my Greek classics. Let God’s will be done, I said. I’m going to reread the Greeks. Respecting the tradition, I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophone, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera The Right to be Born were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens. (81)

This extraordinary compression of events presented alongside references to classical literature, pop culture and sociological statistics continues over the next few pages, recounting Neruda’s Noble Prize, anti-Allende marches, Castro’s visit, the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, strikes, pro-Allende marches, ‘and then came the coup d’état, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end

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to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place and I thought: Peace at last’ (82). The force of this passage relies on Urrutia’s inaction in the face of the world historical events that are shaping Chile in the period between Allende’s election in September 1970 and the military coup in September 1973, and the intersection of these events with his reading, which is predominantly classical and European. While ‘Farewell’s estate was expropriated in the Land Reform’, Urrutia ‘read Thucydides’ (82), who is granted the longest commentary in this passage – seven lines are devoted to explaining Urrutia’s reading of the Athenian whose history was referred to by Irving Kristol, the ‘éminance grise of American neoconservativism, […] as “the favourite neoconservative text on foreign affairs”’ (Lee and Morley 2015: 1). Typically portrayed as a realist and a constructivist who, as John Zumbrunnen notes, is often ‘lumped in with the playwrights, Aristotle and, especially, Plato’ as one of the great Greek thinkers who failed to offer ‘a sympathetic elaboration of democratic possibilities’ (2015: 296), Thucydides is nonetheless concerned with manifestations of power and of justice, a point that Urrutia seems blind to. Indeed, it is unclear that Urrutia learns much from his readings at all; the authors and texts that he cites are valued more, it would seem, for their status as classics and thus as evidence of Urrutia’s qualifications to enter ‘that estate […] where taste was more important than practical necessities and obligations’ (Bolaño 2009a: 5).32 Literature, then, becomes the basis for his own rhetorical ploy to convince us of his innocence: whether it is in his teachings of Marxism to Pinochet, his claims to be unaware of the torture that was taking place beneath his feet, or in his seclusion in his library surrounded by the classics of literature, Urrutia, despite his claims to the contrary, never accepts responsibility for his actions and privileges aesthetics as a realm apart, never complicit with, the world. ‘That is how literature is made’ (127), the final conceit of the novella, is a forced concession on the part of the priest. For O’Bryen, it betrays the novella’s ironizing of ‘a redemptive Christian narrative in which human accountability pales into insignificance before God’ (2011: 481) – literature is made off the back of violence, oppression, and exploitation and that is just the way that it is. Such sentiments lie behind the Benjaminian connection drawn by Bolaño’s critics: for Villalobos-Ruminott, Bolaño tells us that ‘literature does not save but condemns us to be part of the very logic of global violence’ (Villalobos-Ruminott 2009: 195). This perspective takes literature as a mirror of the world – simply, ‘that is how literature is made’ – and, of course, that compromises Urrutia’s conviction in a pure aesthetic realm apart, a place ‘where taste was more important than practical necessities and obligations’ (Bolaño 2009a: 5). In other words, Urrutia’s

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confession relies upon both a pure aesthetic realm and an admission of literature’s embeddedness in the world. In short, Urrutia restates the Kantian paradox that we observed in Moretti’s ‘The Soul and the Harpy’: an insistence, at once, on both the absolute separation of the realms of appearance and the real, of art and the world, and, at the same time, implying their paradoxical relation. In this too, then, Urrutia draws affinities with Moretti’s theory of literature. However, Bolaño’s critics have noted the subversive potential of By Night in Chile: as Eli Jelly-Schapiro argues, ‘Bolaño’s project is threefold: to reveal what is hidden – the exclusions and fractures cast in shadow by the planetary reach of capital […]; to expose the mechanisms through which the black spots in our vision are formed and normalized; and to meditate on the possibilities of a literary assault on the apparatus of reification’ (2015: 88). Urrutia’s experiences as part of the Chilean literary elite warn us against the reification of culture and caution, as Patrick Dove argues, ‘that the routinization involved in the canonization of literary formulas [such as magical realism] has the effect of anesthetizing us to the singularity and the horror of the real’ (2009: 150): in other words, literature can distance us from or desensitize us to the Weberian violence that underpins our societies. However, like Márquez, in drawing attention to the processes by which a rhetoric of innocence can be made, the novella provokes our unease and discontent. Bolaño does so by ‘reveal[ing] what is hidden – the exclusions and fractures’ that, as will be recalled from Moretti, mark modernity itself. In By Night in Chile, from the outset we are alert to the possibilities of alternative narratives and literary undecidability. ‘Take off your wig’, the novella’s epigraph from G. K. Chesterson’s ‘The Purple Wig’ (1914), elicits suspicion of pretensions to nobility. ‘The Purple Wig’ is the story of a lawyer who has been posing as a Duke in order to claim his estate, only to be discovered as a fraud when he is made to remove his wig and thus reveal that he does not carry the deformed ears which are a family trait. As Patrick Dove has argued, ‘it turns out that the English crown was well aware that the lawyer was not a duke when it authenticated the title he had appropriated […]. Indeed, the entire social structure of titles and estates proves to be nothing more than a fiction, an official means of sanctioning and legitimating a form of accumulation that would otherwise be visible as domination, bloodshed and terror’ (2009: 146. Emphasis added).33 The epigraph, then, both foreshadows the motif of false pretensions and their unveiling, as Dove suggests, but also, for us, the undoing of a rhetoric of innocence – revealing the masking of that which ‘would otherwise be visible as domination, bloodshed and terror’. The repeated references to the thirteenth-century poet Sordello – ‘Sordello, which Sordello?’ (15) – offer another example of the way in which the narrative

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resists coherence by incorporating gaps, factures and exclusions. The uncertainty that is attached to Sordello in By Night in Chile is an echo of his characterization as a poet both revered in Dante’s Purgatorio (canto seven) as an honourable patriot and disgraced by his scandalous behaviour. Burwinkle, for example, describes a ‘dual vision of Sordello as both a high literary figure of elite culture and a figure of loss and disappointment [which] highlights what has been his uncanny ability to be what we most need him to be […]. Sordello is just a hard nut to crack and remains a cipher’ (Burgwinkle 2011: 37). The refrain ‘Sordel, Sordello, which Sordello’ (Bolaño 2009a: 17), which recurs throughout the novella, is a gesture towards unknowability and builds upon the many uncertainties in the text – events that are partially recalled, memories which are shadows rather than distinct images, and the text’s own awareness of the way in which any story is open to a ‘multiplicity of readings’ (50), as Farewell tells Urrutia. The wizened youth, who might be read as a representation of Urrutia’s own subconscious (cf. Dove 2009: 147) or as Bolaño himself impinging on his protagonist’s attempt to absolve his guilt, is perhaps the most persistent shadow in the novella. He is identified on page one as spreading ‘slanderous rumours […] to sully [Urrutia’s] name’ (Bolaño 2009a: 1) and throughout troubles the priest’s confession, often mocking or contradicting him: This is how literature is made, that is how the great works of Western literature are made. You better get used to it, I tell him. The wizened youth, or what is left of him, moves his lips, mouthing an inaudible no. The power of my thought has stopped him. Or maybe it was history. An individual is no match for history. The wizened youth has always been alone, and I have always been on history’s side. (128)

Urrutia has felt himself to be, more precisely, on the winning side of history, as evidenced by his alliances with Opus Dei, the Catholic Church and Chile’s authoritarian state. However, as we have seen, By Night in Chile contests the rhetoric of innocence which masks the violence that lies behind history, and the wizened youth serves as another reminder of the persistence of that which is concealed. The novel ends with Urrutia’s realization that the wizened youth might be his repressed self – ‘Am I that wizened youth? […] I am the wizened youth whose cries no one can hear? And that the poor wizened youth is me?’ (129). By such a reading, Urrutia’s observation that ‘the truth begins to rise like a dead body’ (129) can be interpreted as a sign of the priest’s suppressed guilt, or, as López-Vicuña argues, as ‘the rising to the surface of the unconscious: of all the perversity, bad faith and evil latent in recent Chilean history’ (2009 163).

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The ending is certainly a reckoning for Urrutia, but we need not tie the wizened youth strictly to the unconscious – to do so would signal a deeper, primary reality underlying the surface of the text. Rather, the wizened youth, like Sordello, remains a cipher, an unknowable and shadowy presence that occupies the margins of the text who nonetheless troubles the narrative, creating both our and Urrutia’s unease at the pretensions witnessed throughout. In interviews Bolaño has dwelt upon the occupation of his protagonist, Urrutia: I view criticism as a literary creation, not just as the bridge that unites the reader with the writer. […] The interesting thing about literary critics, and that is where I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels, is that he assumes himself to be the reader, of proposing diverse readings, like something completely different from what criticism tends to be, which is like an exegesis or a diatribe. (2009b: 88–9)

Criticism can be an exegesis, explaining what is happening in the text, representing its content in a matter of fact way. This is precisely what Urrutia does: ‘for me nothing on earth could be more fulfilling than to read, and to present the results of my reading in good prose’ (4). The irony is, as we have seen, that Urrutia shows himself to be a poor reader, one who cannot decipher the hidden meaning of Mr Raef and Mr Etah, and who cannot see the paradox of his conviction that literature is at once a pure realm apart and simply the product of the world as it is. Bolaño, on the other hand, maintains the alliance between literature and politics not simply as a relationship of dependence, but one of co-creation: ‘All literature, in a certain sense, is political. I mean, first, it’s a reflection on politics, and second, it’s also a political program’ (1999b: 60). To this I would add that rather than following a prescribed political programme per se, politics in By Night in Chile is an echo of what the Latin American Studies Group promoted as ‘new ways of thinking and acting politically’ (1993: 110) that engage with subaltern, hidden and silenced actors. If literary criticism as exegesis and literature as mere representation are critiqued, then Bolaño’s comments suggest creativity as that which can confront and challenge the rhetoric of innocence. By Night in Chile, then, can be reread creatively as a postcolonial riposte to theories of world literature premised on a reified literary field and instead gestures towards literature’s capacity for dissent, the subject of which the remainder of this book will pursue.

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Modernity in Relation: Rethinking the Sociology of World Literature

‘Our intellectual life is out of kilter’ (1993a: 5) Bruno Latour claims provocatively in We Have Never Been Modern. In order to explore precisely where we have all gone wrong in our critical enterprises, Latour offers a familiar scenario: the experience of opening a daily newspaper. ‘On page eight, there is a story about computers and chips controlled by the Japanese; on page nine, about the right to keep frozen embryos; on page ten, about a forest burning, its columns of smoke carrying off rare species that some naturalists would like to protect’ (1993a: 2). The list of stories goes on and covers a diverse range of locations, governments, agencies, communities and life forms. To focus on just one story, Latour suggests, repeats the pattern, revealing a dizzying array of actors at work within each event. ‘The smallest AIDS virus takes you from sex to the unconscious, then to Africa, tissue cultures, DNA and San Francisco, but the analysts, thinkers, journalists and decision-makers will slice the delicate network traced by the virus for you into tidy compartments where you will find only science, only economy, only social phenomena’ (2). Latour exposes what is easily overlooked in this commonplace experience: that the compartmentalization of knowledge into specific disciplines considered as distinct and non-substitutable obscures the radical relationality of actors and events. Taking into account the many individuals, agencies, environments, and contexts implicated in a particular occurrence shatters any illusion that it can be easily compartmentalized, and yet, still in the shadow of the Enlightenment, critical thinking is dominated by the tendency to do so. At the same time, however, these divisions do not hold in the face of our experience of a daily newspaper, for example, where we witness the vast interrelation of culture, science and nature. Latour’s own discipline of anthropology reveals both the insufficiency and the epistemological significance of this divide. For example, take an academic study of a primitive culture in a remote region of the world:

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‘even the most rationalist ethnographer is perfectly capable of bringing together in a single monograph the myths, ethnosciences, genealogies, political forms, techniques, religions, epics and rites of the people she is studying’ (7). The work of the anthropologist, as we might well expect, produces a single narrative that brings together diverse elements, such that ‘you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated’ (7). Yet, this is precisely what we do not find within the modern critical stance. The three traits – the real, the social and the narrated – occupy distinct epistemological positions with respect to how we approach the world, associated, Latour suggests, with three ‘emblematic figures’ (5) – E. O. Wilson, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida. The first deals with nature and scientific truths, and views sociological contexts and the operation of discourse as irrelevant mediators of a more fundamental reality. The second with sociology, which, in this articulation, as we have seen via Pascale Casanova’s work in Chapter One, assumes the primacy of a field in which a particular distribution of power operates a priori to the actors and events under observation. Finally, the third deals with language and discourse analysis which ‘speaks of truth effects, [and therefore] to believe in the real existence of brain neurons or powers plays would betray enormous naiveté’ (6). ‘Our’ postEnlightenment ‘intellectual life is out of kilter’ (5) because, when faced with complex networks and hybrid assemblages, our disciplinary responses tend to fall into one of the following approaches: first, universalizing abstraction – the identification of objective truths or Kantian things-in-themselves which ‘erase the social and political dimensions, and purify [the] network of any object’ (5); second, specificity – the network is reduced to ‘pure local contingency’ (4), viewed as wholly determined by a specific and already established social, political or cultural context; or third, simulacra – the world reduced to representation and the proliferation of signs with, to evoke Derrida, no outside text and, thus, the network appears to us as always and only a representation and therefore at a remove from a reality that it will never reach.1 Each approach is incompatible with the other and yet they can all be applied from within their disciplinary enclaves. What is lost in this compartmentalization is the relationality and hybridity of the world. We ignore, Latour argues, the fact that ‘all of culture and all of nature get churned up again every day’ (2); we cling to the belief that we must ‘not mix up heaven and earth, the global stage and the local scene, the human and the nonhuman. […] They [the moderns] have cut the Gordian knot with a well-honed sword. The shaft is broken: on the left, they have put the knowledge of things; on the right, power and human politics’ (3).

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World literary theory and criticism, as we have encountered it in its materialist strain, for example, in the works of Casanova, Franco Moretti and the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), to different degrees reproduces this model of modern thought. In turn, this chapter is an attempt to understand Latour’s post-critical critique of the ontological ground of modernity and through his work, as well as that of his key influence, Friedrich Nietzsche, to begin to move towards an alternative that resists a priori structures and retains, in all world texts, the potential for dissent, postcolonial or otherwise. That said, Latour’s philosophy, it will be shown, bears particular relevance for postcolonial studies. The division noted above is essential to Latour’s critique of modernity. The reason that the anthropologist’s monograph can weave a single, unified account from her encounter with the real, the narrated and the collective is because the object of study is not modern. Modernity implies both a rupture in the continuous flow of linear time – the creation of a before and after – and the foundation of an opposition between, as Latour designates it, the ‘victors and the vanquished’ (1993a: 10) – in other words, between those who are modern and those who are not. This is precisely the core–periphery division that we found in Casanova’s world literary empire, in which the West, and specifically Paris, occupied the centre of the literary field as the archetype of modernity while the peripheral, ‘small’ nations lagged behind. Modernity, in other words, is productive of a break which keeps separate the modern and the non-modern within an ever-expanding horizon. And if Christopher Thorne’s (2013) renaming of this process as an empire-not-republic of letters is apt, it is because it is one that mirrors the imperialism described in Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized: the colonizer at once must maintain the break which separates him from the colonized, and, at the same time, purport to bring his civilizing project to the dominated peripheries. It is no coincidence, then, that Latour argues in The Cult of the Factish Gods that modernity begins with the colonial encounter: ‘It all started on the West Coast of Africa, somewhere in Guinea, with the Portuguese’ (2010: 2). More specifically, with this meeting of African and European cultures begins a differentiation between civilization and barbarism, reason and the irrational, which underpins Latour’s definition of what it means to be modern. Modernity, by Latour’s account, signifies the strict delineation of categories – subject and object, fact and representation, science and art – whereas premodern cultures refuse to countenance any division whatsoever, even a dialectical one. Thus, in this moment of imperial expansion, the moderns (Europeans) ‘drop anchor’ and ‘soon set up fetishes: that is, they

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see all the peoples they encounter as worshippers of meaningless objects’ (2). Faced with alterity, the colonizer attributes barbarism and ignorance to the cultural and religious practices of the colonized who make fetishes out of the objects they create and worship. The modern critical perspective, on the other hand, classifies the fabricated object of worship as either an artifice (a manmade representation and therefore devoid of ‘real’ spirituality) or an actual embodiment of the divine without human mediation. Both parties, colonizer and colonized, have their religious icons and images, but what condemns the Guineans is their failure, from the Portuguese perspective, to distinguish between their idols, which they considered to be both created and divine, and those of the colonizer, which, from the modern perspective, could not be both. In refusing the distinction between representation and the real, the Guineans condemned themselves as non-modern, as the unenlightened, uncivilized barbarians of colonial history. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart presents a similar confrontation in the conversations between Mr Brown, a European missionary who is in the process of establishing a church in the community of Umuofia, and a powerful tribal elder, Akunna. Of the two representatives of the Christian church in the novel – Mr Brown and the Reverend James Smith – Mr Brown is a far more accommodating figure, ‘respected even by the clan, because he trod softly on its faith’ (Achebe 1962: 126). However, his conversations with Akunna highlight the limits of his cultural relativism as it becomes apparent that the missionary cannot accommodate the hybrid ‘factish’ into his view of religion: ‘You say that there is one supreme God who made heaven and earth’, said Akunna on one of Mr Brown’s visits. ‘We also believe in Him and call Him Chukwu. He made all the world and the other gods’. ‘There are no other gods’, said Mr Brown. ‘Chukwu is the only God and all others are false. You carve a piece of wood – like that one’ (he pointed at the rafters from which Akunna’s carved Ikenga hung), ‘and you call it a god. But it is still a piece of wood’. ‘Yes’, said Akunna. ‘It is indeed a piece of wood. The tree from which it came was made by Chukwu, as indeed all minor gods were. But He made them for His messengers so that we could approach Him through them. […] It is the same with God, or Chukwu. He appoints smaller gods to help Him because His work is too great for one person’. ‘You should not think of him as a person’, said Mr Brown. ‘It is because you do so that you imagine He must need helpers. And the worst thing about it is that you give all worship to the false gods you have created.’ (126–7)

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Communication between these two cultures operates via channels of translation, both in the sense that Mr Brown employs a translator to mediate between himself and the tribe, and insofar as he too attempts to ‘translate’ the terms of his religion into recognizable figures in this scene by stating an equivalence between the Christian God and Chukwu – ‘Chukwu is the only God and all others are false’. However, the European’s version of ‘Chukwu’ reverts to modern thinking as Mr Brown emphasizes the separation between immanence and transcendence (for Mr Brown, God is the transcendent creator, while, for Akunna, he is both absolute creator – transcendent – and part of everything – immanent); between human and divine (for Mr Brown, the separation is total – ‘You should not think of him as a person’ – while Akunna sees no conflict in doing so); and between fetish and fact (‘you give all the worship to false idols’). This, Latour suggests in We Have Never Been Modern, is precisely the work of modern critique. Separating society and science, the moderns have made themselves ‘invincible’ (1993a: 38) because any position can be countered by the view from the alternative one: You think that the spirits of the ancestors hold you forever hostage to their laws? The modern critique will show you that you are hostages to yourselves and that the spiritual world is your own human – too human – construction. You then think that you can do everything and develop your societies as you see fit? The modern critique will show you that the iron laws of society and economics are much more inflexible than those of your ancestors. (38)

In other words, a religious theology is countered by an atheistic humanism, which, in turn, is countered by the sociology of capitalism. ‘Century after century, colonial empire after colonial empire, the poor premodern collectives were accused of making a horrible mishmash of things and humans, of objects and signs, while their accusers finally separated them totally’ (39). Latour, like Achebe, shines a light on the radical break that modernity institutes between self and other, human and non-human, the real and its representation. Latour turns to the work of an Indian author, U. R. Ananthamurthy, specifically Bharathipura, his novel of post-independence India and the prevailing caste system, for a contemporary example of this encounter. Latour focuses on a scene that mirrors India’s attempts to modernize in the interactions between Jagannath (a Brahman) and the pariah community who work for his aunt. Wishing to break their premodern attachment to a holy black stone, Jagannath forces them to touch it and thus to break their bond with the fetish. Through this incident Latour argues that Jagannath, repeating the work of modern criticism,

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enforces two breaks. The first creates a ‘violent separation between the subject and the object poles, between the world of representations and the world of things’ (2010: 29) – the Brahmin forces the pariahs to recognize that the stone is a mere representation and not endowed with a mystical force, thus making absolute a division between representation and the real where previously no distinction was in operation. The second break produces ‘a separation between the theoretical form of life, which takes this first distinction between objects and subjects seriously, and a quite different practical form of life in which we carry on in peace and quiet’ (29). Jagannath’s ‘theoretical perspective’, his modern outlook grounded in the division of representation and the real, religion and society, cannot accommodate the premodern view in which the fetish is both a natural object and a divinity. His act, then, does not reveal the idol to be false, but, rather, undermines the ‘practical’ compromise which simply lets us live alongside hybrids – what Latour in this work refers to as ‘factishes’, a portmanteau of fact and fetish, encapsulating the way in which ‘facts’ come to us as constructed representations, and in which the fetishes accounted for in his essay take on the materiality of natural facts. The priest, the aunt, and the pariahs already know what Jagannath discovers by his failure: it has nothing to do with belief, it is all about those off-center beings that allow us to live, that is, to pass continually from construction to autonomy without ever believing in either. Thanks to factishes, construction and truth remain synonymous. Once broken, they become antonyms. We can no longer pass. We can no longer create. (28)

I suggest that Achebe’s Things Fall Apart presents a complementary scenario in a passage that outlines the working of the tribe’s justice system. In this moment, a crowd gathers to watch as the egwugwu assemble to sit in judgement of a particular case of a man accused of beating his wife: ‘Each of the nine egwugwu represented a village of the clan. Their leader was called Evil Forest. Smoke poured out of his head’ (Achebe 1962: 63). The egwugwu are considered by the tribe to be the ancestral spirits of Umuofia, ‘the most powerful and the most secret cult in the clan’ (63), and it is clear that their authority is unquestioned by the witnesses to this scene. This is part of the novel’s demonstration that, despite the views of the colonizers, Umofian society functions effectively with its own systems of law and order, justice, religion and honours. However, Achebe introduces an element of doubt in his text: ‘Okonkwo’s wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwugwu had the springly walk of Okonkwo. And they might also have noticed that

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Okonkwo was not among the titled men and elders who sat behind the row of egwugwu’ (63–4). In other words, the constructed and representational presence of the ancestral spirits is made apparent in this moment. However, this does not strike me as an attempt on Achebe’s part to attribute false consciousness to the tribe and their religious beliefs. It holds out the possibility that the tribe are perfectly aware of the performance that is taking place, and that they well know that the efficacy of their justice system relies upon the tacit acceptance of the community in this scenario. Furthermore, as in the case of the conversations between Mr Brown and Akunna, the Umofians refuse the absolute distinction between the divine and the human, between fetish and fact. The justice system works precisely because its participants can pass between the two sides. Rather, it is to the modern observer, a role assumed in the novel by the District Commissioner who believes that at best one could write ‘a reasonable paragraph’ (148) about Achebe’s protagonist, Okonkwo, that this scene must seem unsettling, inviting us to find an absolute break between fact and representation, and, in so doing, confirm the division that separates primitive and modern, colonized and colonizer. As such, the novel questions the modern critical stance as a perpetuation of the colonial mindset, and raises the possibility of an alternative viewpoint, one premised on the acceptance of the hybridity of this constructed factish. In the face of a world of ever-multiplying hybrids which transgress the division between human and non-human, culture and nature, modern critique will ultimately encounter an impasse. In its theoretical articulation, modern critique insists upon the separation of subject and object, representation and the real, what Latour refers to as a process of purification. In practice, however, the proliferation of hybrids and factishes proceeds irrespective of the fact that modern critique refuses to account for their existence. The central hypothesis of We Have Never Been Modern is surmised by Latour in the following: The word ‘modern’ designates two different sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by ‘translation’, creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second type, by ‘purification’, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. Without the first set, the practices of purification would be fruitless or pointless. Without the second, the work of translation would be slowed down, limited, or even ruled out. The first set corresponds to what I have called networks; the second to what I shall call the modern critical stance. (1993a: 11–12)

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The process of purification by which an incommensurable separation is posed, in theory, between nature and culture, transcendence and immanence, is illustrated in the example of the tribal fetish as a form that vacillates between representation and the real. The modern critical stance considers the two processes of translation and purification as wholly separate and assumes an ontological ground determined by an a priori structure or cause which institutes that division. As such, ‘the Modern repertoire […] keeps anything from happening in the middle’ (2010: 19). In Latour’s network theory of hybrids and translations, by contrast, ‘everything happens in the middle, everything passes between the two, everything happens by way of mediation, translation and networks’ (1993a: 37), a nod towards the Deleuzian direction of his thinking.2 As this focus on the middle suggests, Latour is not arguing that all along the so-called premoderns were right and we should return to that way of thinking – ‘I am not reviving the theme of the idols of the forum, marketplace, or temple in order to accuse reasonable people of believing, in spite of everything, the way the Gold Coast Blacks or the pariahs did’ (2010: 33). As noted in the long passage above, both processes of purification and translation have roles to play, so long as they are not taken as separate and incommensurable practices. Indeed, without the process of purification, ‘the work of translation would be slowed down, limited, or even ruled out’. The premoderns, Latour claims, were so entirely devoted to ‘conceiving of hybrids’ that they ‘excluded their proliferation. It is this disparity that would explain the Great Divide between Them – all the other cultures – and Us – the westerners’ (1993a: 12). There is no way beyond the impasse between the missionary who resorts to theological dogma and the cultural relativism of the tribal elder who sees no difference between the religious practices of the Christians and those of the Ibo. In turn, the price paid by the Western imperialist for the freedom to (blindly and without recognition) evoke both regimes of translation and purification is ‘that they remained unable to conceptualize themselves in continuity with the premoderns. They had to think of themselves as absolutely different, they had to invent the Great Divide’ (39). Furthermore, the temporality which underlies the ‘Great Divide’ instituted by modernity is one paradoxically dependent both on the idea of rupture (the possibility of a radical break from the past) and on an irreversible flow or passage of time (the teleological movement of progress). To an extent, this is precisely what we found in Casanova’s account of world literature: literary modernity is a measure of radical newness, innovation and experimentation (a break from tradition and social context) and an irreversible, singular process towards

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increasing autonomy at work across the literary field (teleology). Casanova’s world literary republic re-enacts the paradox of a modernity that claims at once an absolute break and a singular teleological unfolding across time. While Latour’s philosophy rejects totalizing theories of power premised on strictly ideological grounds or structural formations, his theory of network and relationality – what he calls actor-network theory (ANT) – nonetheless offers an explanation of the ways in which hierarchies, ideologies and even empires gain and maintain a position of dominance. As he argues in The Cult of the Factish Gods, ‘when we lose the distinction between representations and facts, we by no means plunge into indifferentiation’ (2010: 51) – Latour’s relational philosophy is not one in which anything goes. I shall return to that later; however, at this point it is worth teasing out the extent to which Latour’s philosophy departs from the dualist framework characteristic of a dominant strand of post-Cartesian Western thought. As Blok and Jensen argue, ‘from Descartes and Kant to Hegel, Heidegger, Habermas and Derrida […]. These philosophers base their thinking on firmly held beliefs about a radical division between the subjective and the objective, or between language and the world’ (2011: 12). Like Gilles Deleuze, who rejected the dualisms of Descartes along with the oppositional structure of the Hegelian dialectic, Latour aligns himself with philosophies of monism (Leibniz, Whitehead, Tarde, Stengers), immanence (Deleuze) and vitalism (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson).3 In place of a world divided, Latour develops a philosophy of immanence and of relation that is focused on the circulation and hybridization of what he calls ‘actors’ without recourse to a priori concepts of the subject, society and nature. Just as Deleuze argued that ‘there are no such things as universals, there’s nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all the same’ (Deleuze 1995: 145), Latour never refuses the idea that processes are at work that create subjects, societies, ideologies and so on, but, rather, challenges their status as absolute, transcendent and a priori givens. Modernity, on the other hand, treats as separate culture and nature and totalizes that divide. Such is the work of purification, which begins, Latour argues in We Have Never Been Modern, with Kant and the separation of two pure forms – the inaccessible thing-in-itself and phenomenon – and is taken forward by Hegel in the concept of the dialectic – ‘by believing that he was abolishing Kant’s separation between things-in-themselves and the subject, Hegel brought the separation even more fully to life. He raised it to the level of a contradiction, pushed it to the limit and beyond, then made it the driving force of history’

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(Latour 1993a: 57). Both philosophers retain a sense of mediation to an extent – between the subject and the thing-in-itself for Kant, and between the two sides mobilized in the dialectical relation for Hegel – but it plays a secondary role as the mediation of already established or pure forms. Thus, dialectics is ‘a fairy tale’ because ‘nothing is inherent in anything else. […] Contradictions are negotiated like the rest. They are built, not given’ (Latour 1993b: 180). The issue that Latour raises against dialectical philosophy strikes a chord with Deleuze’s own critique of Hegel and Descartes: they, like all modern philosophers (in Latour’s sense), assume an a priori as the first or final cause of being, and posit a negative opposition in which what something is is determined by what it is not. Latour’s critique of modernity, in other words, extends the ontological lineage that Deleuze once traced from Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, and affirms a constructivist philosophy in which the potential for newness, resistance and change is an always-present horizon within this world. For Latour, the social is emphatically constructed, but its form is neither inevitable nor fixed and, thus, is liable to be dissembled and reassembled anew. The hybridity of actors is the mark of their precarious assemblage, but also their potential to resist, challenge and reconstitute those social forms and other actors which threaten to dominate. So far this chapter has drawn on Latour’s reframing of modernity in order to align it with the postcolonial impetus to contest the Great Divide at the heart of modern thinking: world literature theorized, as it is by Casanova and Moretti, as the epiphenomenon of modernity is compromised by the imperialist ideology implicit within the fixed dualisms and a priori structures that throw ‘our intellectual life […] out of kilter’ (Latour 1993a: 5). The remainder of this chapter seeks to widen our focus and explore the implications of Latour’s philosophy for literature more broadly, in order to reimagine the sociology of world literature when viewed in a postcolonial frame. In this way, Postcolonialism After World Literature argues for a relational-constructivist rather than strictly structuralist account of the ways in which literature creates a world in which the critic and reader alike may trace the potential for new forms of resistance to imperialist hegemonies, and hear the voices of hitherto silenced actors as the basis for imagining a postcolonial future yet-to-come. In order to reach that point, however, we will need a fuller account of the work of Latour’s central philosophical influence, Friedrich Nietzsche; for it is in Nietzsche that Latour finds a non-dialectical ontology in which being is grounded in the relation of active and reactive forces, in which resistance is the sign of the balance of those forces, and in which art and literature are characterized as the mirror not of

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a wider social reality but of that primary ontological condition. Finally, it is through the fiction of Pauline Melville, and in particular her 2009 novel Eating Air, that we can construct an image of thought that takes us from a Latourian critique of modernity through to a Nietzschean aesthetics of dissent. Eating Air, it will be shown, provocatively suggests a world in which the play of active and reactive forces – in Nietzschean terms, the conflict of Dionysus and Apollo – is the ground of aesthetic expressions of resistance in the face of imperialist certainties and the modern regulatory framework that posits civilization against its barbaric other.

Pauline Melville’s Eating Air and the crisis of modernity The work of the Guyanese-born writer Pauline Melville has long interrogated Enlightenment legacies, most notably what Latour has designated the work of purification. Her short story ‘The Parrot and Descartes’, published in The Migration of Ghosts, for example, returns to the moment at which ‘mind and matter started to divide, body and soul to separate and science and magic to march in opposite directions’ (Melville 1999: 111), and hints at the limitations of a rationalism that was ‘born, by chance, out of the dark disorder of war’ (110). Elements of chance, disorder and chaos confront the basis of the modern state and rule of law but, crucially, they are born of the same reality: this is the message implicit in Melville’s critique of the Enlightenment in ‘The Parrot and Descartes’. In Melville’s most recent novel, Eating Air, the novelist once more takes up the notion of a co-dependency between order and chaos by means of a ‘loose re-working’ of Euripides’ The Bacchae: ‘If Euripides were around I hope that he would excuse my loose re-working of themes from The Bacchae. I also acknowledge standing on the shoulders of many other authors who have given us versions of Venus and Adonis’ (Melville 2009: 408).4 Transposing the action into the present and against the backdrop of contemporary terrorism and Islamic extremism considered as an extension of the violent activities of the radical left of the mid-twentieth century, Melville reworks the great themes of Euripides’ drama: the conflict between state and anarchy, reason and the irrational, civilization and chaos – foundational and opposed regimes within the modern world’s purified outlook. Signalling her take on terror in an interview in which she discussed the origins and inspiration behind her most recent novel, Melville describes a traumatic event in which she was attacked in

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her London flat by an intruder who was on licence from Broadmoor, a highsecurity psychiatric hospital: ‘Even at the time, I understood what it was like to be him’; ‘I felt how powerful it is when someone discards all the laws you live by to do the most outrageous things. It wasn’t that it was admirable – but it was fascinating’ (Melville cited in Jaggi 2010: n.p.). It is this fascination with what the novel refers to as ‘the pleasures of extremism’ that inspires its exploration of terrorism and revolutionary action. In particular, Eating Air imagines what might happen if the ‘terrorist left’ (Melville 2009: 61) of the 1960s and 1970s joined forces with contemporary radical Islamists. As the novel shifts between a post-9/11 present in which formerly revolutionary characters, such as Hector, Mark and Khaled, find themselves middle-aged, disaffected and impotent in the face of a world of inequalities that they once took up arms against and a historical timeframe that accounts for their past lives as militants in leftist groups, such as the Brigate Rosse, the novel imagines an alliance between these former radicals and a group of Islamic extremists who are planning a terrorist attack on a Dutch bank. Mark, whom the novel implicates in a murder for which his friend, Hector, is imprisoned, sets out the rationale for this ‘strategic alliance’ in his attempt to recruit Hector to the cause: ‘they attack the same things as us. You can make strategic alliances for particular targets. Look at the attacks on Mumbai. It was the hugely wealthy hotels and western bankers that were targeted. It was not dissimilar to what we targeted in the seventies’ (97). Both parties, communist and radical Islamist, find common cause in their vision of violent and revolutionary change, overthrowing Western capitalism and ushering in a wholly new society. As Mark argues, ‘I’d still like to see the whole system crash and burn in flames. […] Yes. I fucking hate religion too but not as much as I hate capitalism’ (99). This ‘strategic alliance’ is at the heart of the novel’s reimagining of the conflict between Dionysus and Pentheus (anarchy and state), made explicit by the author’s acknowledgement of her intertexts, but it serves too as an implicit critique of modernity. As we have seen with Latour, modernity imposes a regime of purified categories and seeks to distinguish the modern and the non-modern, the civilized core and the barbarian other. Contemporary representations of radical Islam take a similar position by characterizing groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS as irretrievably incompatible with modernity, even while their media presence, weaponry and recruitment techniques suggest otherwise. Melville’s novel expressly resists this ‘modern’ characterization of radical Islam, and in doing so, I suggest, draws a connection between the activities of Islamic terrorists and the radical left that recalls John Gray’s Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern.

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Gray’s work stands against the dominant understanding of terror post-9/11. Giovanna Borradori in her introduction to Philosophy in a Time of Terror, which was published in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, for example, writes, The explicit ideology of the terrorists who attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11 is a rejection of the kind of modernity and secularization that in the philosophical tradition is associated with the concept of Enlightenment. In philosophy, the Enlightenment describes not only a specific period, which historically coincided with the eighteenth century, but also the affirmation of democracy and the separation of political power from religious belief that the French and American Revolutions made their focus. (Borradori 2003: 14)

It is this reading of radical Islamic terrorism and Al Qaeda that Gray explicitly rejects. ‘No cliché is more stupefying’, Gray writes, ‘than that which describes Al Qaeda as a throwback to medieval times. It is a by-product of globalisation’ (2003: 1). Whereas Borradori views radical Islam as standing in opposition to the Enlightenment and its associated concepts of progress and modernity, Gray argues that both are born of the same teleological conviction and that far from viewing radical Islam as a medieval throwback, we must instead understand it as fundamentally modern insofar as it, like Marxism, is derived from Enlightenment values: ‘Anyone who doubts that revolutionary terror is a modern invention has contrived to forget recent history. The Soviet Union was an attempt to embody the Enlightenment ideal of a world without power or conflict. In pursuit of this ideal it killed and enslaved tens of millions of human beings. […] The gas chambers and the gulags are modern’ (2). Unlike other post-9/11 commentators, Gray views Al Qaeda as not merely compatible with other modern totalitarian regimes, but as a product of modernity itself. What links Marx and Fukuyama, radical Islam and Enlightenment ideals, Gray suggests, is an absolute conviction in the possibility of bringing about a new world and the end of history (albeit in each case a differently conceived world). Each maintains that ‘a universal civilisation will come into being, and history will come to an end’ (3). Thus, what distinguishes communism from the Roman Empire and makes the former a product of modernity is a teleological utopianism which foresees the emergence of an absolute, single way of being: ‘Like Marxists and neo-liberals, radical Islamists see history as a prelude to a new world. All are convinced that they can remake the human condition. If there is a uniquely modern myth, this is it’ (3). While Gray does not stretch his ideas as far as Latour, what they share is a sense of modernity characterized by a sharp distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ both in political and cultural terms – in this case, modernity defined by the capitalist

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West is deemed incompatible with the ‘medieval’ views of radical Islam – and, more significantly, as a temporal fracture, or what Latour refers to as the ‘Great Divide’ (Latour 1993a: 39). As we saw earlier, this ‘Great Divide’ is paradoxically dependent on two contradictory, purified concepts of time: the idea of rupture (the possibility of an absolute break with the past) and on an irreversible flow or passage of time (the teleological movement of progress). This double and paradoxical temporality is precisely what unites communism and radical Islam under the legacies of the Enlightenment for Gray: both envision a radical break from Western capitalism in its current and historical guise; both view history as the inevitable movement towards that end; and, thus, both are modern. Eating Air explicitly stages the complementarity of these seemingly opposed, but equally modern perspectives. Hector, for example, after listening to the arguments of Mark and the group of radical Islamists that he has joined with in order to plan the attack, is forced to acknowledge their shared revolutionary consciousness: ‘To his annoyance he recognised in Shahid something of his younger self: the fervour, the exultant righteousness, the willingness to sacrifice, the ardour of shared beliefs, the millenarian glint in the eye, that last push to utopia […]. He realised how much he missed the great transforming idea – the intoxicating idea that explains the whole world’ (Melville 2009: 77). Both Hector (the former left-wing terrorist) and Shahid (the radical Islamist) maintain an absolute, utopian faith in ‘the great transforming idea’: a conviction that a new world order may be brought about through struggle. As such, I argue that Melville takes up Gray’s understanding of radical Islam as a rival modernity comparable to mid-twentieth-century Marxism. Like Gray, she stresses the singular force of capitalism which threatens to co-opt all societies under its terms (Fukuyama’s end of history): as Inspector Buckley observes, ‘everything we feared from communism is being brought about by capitalism: bland uniformity, cloned cities, secret prisoners, omnipresent surveillance’ (61). And with characters such as Shahid, she draws express parallels between the project of the Soviet Union and the aims of the terrorists: ‘Islam is not just a religion. It’s a political ideology similar to yours. Look. Communism didn’t work. Capitalism doesn’t work. The only solution left is Islam’. He laughed again and his eyes widened. ‘We’re jumping into the void left by the Soviet Union. […] It’s an amazing feeling when you understand that – when the walls of everyday life fall down and there is exposed in front of you a sort of uplifting glory – a massive feeling that you yourself can stream out into eternity and join with Allah’. (75)

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For Gray, the utopian moment of transcendence reimagines the human condition and envisions a new world without conflict, and to that end, he argues, it is a figment of the revolutionary imagination, not a prescription for a viable society. Gray’s critique of what it means to be modern, then, rests upon a false conviction in the inevitability of historical progress and the stability of the division between modern and non-modern. His examples of post-Enlightenment modern radicalism never move beyond totalitarianism to realize an ideal of a world without conflict, an acknowledgement we see in Eating Air in the example given of the Situationists who ‘hoped to build a society’ as pure as crystal, but ultimately ‘expelled everybody’ because ‘nobody could keep up with the level of purity demanded by the group’ (21). Thus, these revolutionaries (like the novel’s Marxists and radical Islamists) fall under Gray’s critique of modern millenarian movements since they reject established authority but, crucially, they do so in an attempt to realize a world without conflict. What, then, is Gray’s solution? Interestingly, he, like Melville, turns to Euripides: In the plays of Euripides, knowledge cannot undo the workings of fate; virtue gives no protection against disaster. The most that humans can do is to be brave and resourceful, and expect to achieve little. Very likely we cannot revive this pagan view of things; but perhaps we can learn from it how to limit our hopes. […] Science cannot rid us of the conflicts of ethics and politics. Tyranny is bad, but so is anarchy. The state is necessary to protect us against violence, but it easily turns violent itself. We must contain terrorism if we are to have any kind of civilised life, but in doing so we run the risk of compromising the life we are trying to protect. Such conflicts are normal. (Gray 2003: 115–16)

Gray here counters the teleological utopianism of modernity’s revolutionary movements, which promise to usher in a new world without conflict, without history, with a doctrine of moderation. There is a balancing act operative in his claim – we must live the best we can amid the competing forces of terror and civilization, anarchy and the state – but in limiting our hopes for humanity’s potential to change, for a better world that is more tolerant, more equal, more united, what Gray effectively proposes at the end of Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern is an ideology of moderation. And that, I suggest, is only to partially understand the lessons of The Bacchae.5 To be sure, Tiresias’s caution at the outset of the play implores Pentheus to restrain his anger against the ‘upstart god Dionysus’, who has inspired the women of Thebes to drink, dance and ‘go creeping off / This way and that to lonely places and give themselves / To lecherous

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men’ (Euripides 1972: 198). However, his plea is directed against Pentheus’s denial of the god. Tiresias urges Pentheus to acknowledge that ‘There are two powers, young man, which are supreme / In human affairs’, the earth goddess, Demeter, who ‘Supplies mankind with solid food’ (200), and Dionysus, who gives him wine. In refusing to acknowledge both powers, Pentheus becomes the vehicle by which the tragedy unfolds as he is tricked by Dionysus into disguising himself as a woman in order to spy on the revelries of the Maenads, only to be discovered and torn limb from limb by his own mother who has lost herself in a state of Dionysian intoxication. Gray’s world view maintains an essentially tragic perspective when read against the myth of Dionysus: as Nietzsche argues in The Birth of Tragedy the figures of ‘the Greek stage – Prometheus, Oedipus and so on – are merely masks of that original hero, Dionysus’ (Nietzsche 2003: 51), in whose suffering the Greeks recognized a world that was amoral, contradictory and a source of pain. Although Pentheus seeks to deny Dionysus within the play, he ultimately comes to serve as another mask for this original tragic figure. As John Sallis has observed, the king’s violent death at the hands of his own mother re-enacts the dismemberment of Dionysus by the Titans in Greek mythology: ‘Thus he [Pentheus] is driven not merely to recognize the identity of the god but to embody, to enact, that identity to the point of his own destruction’ (Sallis 1991: 45). What a Nietzschean reading of The Bacchae exposes is the cyclical, Janus-faced process by which individuality is transgressed, dissembled, and disrupted before it is reconstituted once again, bringing us back to the start of the cycle. This is the function of Dionysus. But this process is only possible, as Tiresias reminds us, because of the presence of two powers in human affairs: Dionysus and Demeter – the intoxication brought on by wine and the ‘solid food’ of everyday existence – or, as Nietzsche characterizes it, Dionysus and Apollo. These two figures of Greek mythology constitute for Nietzsche the two primary forces of art: Dionysus – the god of chaos, intoxication, unregulated emotion and sexuality; Apollo – the god of civilization, form and individuation, and of appearance and illusion. The duality of these two powers in Greek tragedy and in art in general means that it is not enough to preach moderation as a response to a world that is fundamentally conflicted, violent and chaotic. John Gray’s reaction to the recurring crisis of modernity in which self and other, subject and object are continually opposed, in other words, fails to grasp the relation of forces at work in The Bacchae. Moderation, Nietzsche argues, is the call of Apollo: ‘For Apollo seeks to pacify individuals by drawing boundaries between them, and by repeatedly calling them to mind as the most sacred universal laws in his demands for self-knowledge and moderation’ (Nietzsche 2003: 50). If we

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are to heed Tiresias’s advice and acknowledge the duality of a world that is both ordered and chaotic, reason and the irrational, then following Apollo alone and learning ‘limit our hopes’ (Gray 2003: 115) will not suffice. Pauline Melville’s Eating Air is, the author acknowledges, loosely based on The Bacchae and through her reimagining of the coming together of the radical left and contemporary Islamic extremists she evokes, I have argued, John Gray’s critique of modernity. In turn, that critique shares common ground with the philosophical arguments of Latour, for whom modernity in general, rather than Gray’s specific examples of revolutionary movements and extremist ideologies, is caught within a paradoxical temporality that at once stresses a teleological certainty about the unfolding of history and strives always to differentiate itself from a non-modern periphery. However, Melville’s reading of tragedy can be shown to reflect a relational duality that underpins not merely Nietzsche’s account of the relation of Dionysus and Apollo in The Birth of Tragedy, but his philosophy more broadly.6 Tracing Nietzsche’s philosophical reflection on the non-dialectical relation of forces in The Birth of Tragedy will ultimately lead us back to Latour, for whom the profound influence of Nietzsche underpins his philosophy. One scene in particular stands out in Melville’s novel as a reworking of a Nietzschean vision of a world that is chaos and contradiction masked by the Apolline veil of appearance and illusion. It involves a character, Victor Skynnard, whom the fictional author of the tale, Baron S, calls ‘well-meaning’ but who ‘makes your heart sink whenever he appears’ (Melville 2009: 12). Victor is a leftleaning playwright, formerly associated in the 1970s with Situationist radicals, but rather cowardly in nature, preferring to imagine revolutionary action than to actually participate in it. He daydreams of conducting a citizen’s arrest of Tony Blair for crimes associated with the 2003 Iraq War, yet when Mark appears at his door, still subject to a British arrest warrant for activities dating back to his involvement with the Brigate Rosse, he is terrified of the consequences and helps Mark move on as quickly as possible. He stands apart, then, from the hardline convictions and violent actions of Mark, as well as from the irreverent and unpredictable Donny, who serves as the novel’s Dionysus figure. Nonetheless, he is, Baron S realizes, ‘the random thread with which I could begin to unravel the whole fabric of the tale’ (13). Victor becomes involved in the writing and production of a play, Dionysus Revisited, based around the legend of Parzival (another avatar of Dionysus) and the Holy Grail as a metaphor for the conflict between Islam and the West. Victor explains the plot to Vera Scobie, Mark’s mother and the actress he wants to play one of the main characters, but as he travels to his meeting with her he experiences a moment of Dionysian terror.

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It begins in characteristic form as he indulges in a conspiracy theory that ‘all Britain’s top assassins were writers of international reputation. […] Was it possible that Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard and Julian Barnes were all government spies and trained assassins? […] No wonder my work is not well received, he thought bitterly’ (294). The thought that literary success is a measure of writers’ complicity with the state and government becomes an explanation for Victor’s own failings. However, in the next moment it is revealed as a placebo: As the train continued Victor’s enlightenment spectacles of reason and optimism suddenly fell off and for a minute he saw the world as a seething panorama of terrifying ogres, potential murderers, random violence, pagan coincidences and meaningless events. He shut his eyes until reality had passed and his normal illusions were back in place. (294)

Victor has glimpsed here what Nietzsche would recognize as the abyssal reality that lies behind the veil of appearance. Form, shape and individuation are the illusory creations of Apollo. This is most apparent to us in dreams in which we experience a world that is at once absorbing and acknowledged as an illusion, but the history of philosophy also tells us, Nietzsche argues, that mankind has long ‘sense[d] that beneath the reality in which we live there is hidden a second, quite different world, and that our own world is therefore an illusion’ (2003: 15). Nietzsche finds this in Schopenhauer’s distinction between will and representation, which was, in turn, a reformulation of the Kantian split between phenomena and the thing-in-itself. In The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer’s dualism returns as Dionysus and Apollo, life and image. Life, understood by Nietzsche as the primal Oneness, is a state of undifferentiated being from which we are torn away as we become our individuated selves, thus making individuation the cause of all suffering and that which must be overcome – a process encapsulated by the dismemberment of Dionysus and the dissolution of the self that comes with intoxication. Accordingly, all that we experience as individuated form (image) is associated with Apollo and is, therefore, an illusion. This distinction between image and form, however, should not be misunderstood as a return to dialectical thinking or a repetition of what Latour would see as the conceptual fallacy of the moderns.7 Apollo and Dionysus are not opposed as absolute contradictions in The Birth of Tragedy, but rather signal two distinct and mutually dependent forces of nature: The primal Oneness, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the delightful vision, the pleasurable illusion for its constant redemption: an illusion

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that we, utterly caught up in it and consisting of it – as a continuous becoming in time, space and causality, in other words – are required to see as empirical reality. (25)

This is an important moment in The Birth of Tragedy, one that supports Sallis’s conviction that Nietzsche’s first work is neither Hegelian nor dialectical despite the philosopher’s later claims in Ecce Homo (cf. Sallis 1991: 57). Apollo and Dionysus are not contradictory forces to be resolved within a higher unity, but the interdependent twin halves of a single reality. Dionysus might reveal to us something of primal nature as the dissolution of the self and of reason – the vision that Victor is faced with as his ‘enlightenment spectacles’ slip – but the tragic hero nonetheless ‘needs the delightful vision, the pleasurable illusion’ of his counterpart, Apollo. Or, as Nietzsche writes, ‘it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified’ (2003: 32). This often-cited quote returns us to the centrality of art and aesthetics within Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy and points towards the significant role that he attributes to Apollo. In characterizing the Apolline, individuated image as an illusion Nietzsche is not seeking to dismiss it as mere appearance. The Birth of Tragedy, rather, inverts the Platonic notion of mimesis, since the Apolline image, while secondary to a more primal reality, is nonetheless a more perfect and sublime rendering of the everyday thing to which it corresponds. The artwork of the Apolline artist, therefore, does not stand in a subordinate position to a fuller or more authentic original reality; it is not a mere representation of something else. Rather, it presents a higher state, an image that while individuated and recognizable to us as form nevertheless embodies aspects of the two primary forces of art and serves to affirm life through a creative expression. Apolline art saves us from falling into the nihilistic despair of Silenus, Dionysus’s companion, for whom ‘the best and most desirable thing of all for mankind […] [was] not to be born, not to be, to be nothing’ (Nietzsche 2003: 22).8 This will to nothingness, as Nietzsche later argues in The Genealogy of Morals, is a turning away from the world and from life. Thus, ‘in order to be able to live at all they [the Greeks] had to interpose the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians between themselves and those horrors’ of existence (22). The world can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon because there is no higher authority to be found in primary nature, only the dissolution of the self and of all forms. The world and the self, understood as ‘a continuous becoming in time, space and causality’, is experienced as individuated being because of the workings of Apolline power.9 In Greek tragedy, Dionysus’s presence can be observed on

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the stage only because he is given precise form and clear voice. The two forces, therefore, are mutually dependent, and at work in The Birth of Tragedy is not a process of dialectical sublation but a continually shifting balance between Dionysus and Apollo. The highest aim of art, then, is not the triumph of one force over the other: rather, the expression of the power of individuation and the imaginative recreation of its perfect form will give way within a cycle to the ‘Dionsyaic impulse [that] then devours this whole world of phenomena’ (106). The artist ‘like a prolific deity of individuation’ (106) creates distinct characters and settings, creates a world in all its distinctiveness and particularity, and ‘in this sense his work can hardly be seen as an “imitation of nature”’ (106). Rather, it is an expression of the Apolline force of nature. Furthermore, if that artist be ‘great’ (for Nietzsche, if they attain the artistic heights of tragedy, lyric or music, the Dionysian arts), the world of individuated phenomena created in the work will be disturbed, transgressed, dissolved by the Dionysian force that tends towards the primal unity – community overtakes the individual; indistinct genders, races and sexualities disrupt the security of fixed identity; irrational and unexplained events impinge on rational causality. In this way, the destruction of the individual is at once the ultimate goal and unrealizable limit of Nietzschean aesthetics. However, he envisages no transcendence of this dualism, and thus ‘Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo finally speaks the language of Dionysus’ (104). The Dionysian abyss, then, foreshadows, I suggest, what Deleuze later theorizes as the virtual, as we shall see in Chapter Three: a creative and destructive force that cannot itself be encountered (one cannot become a body without organs) but which we sense in disruptions, deterritorializations and becoming as the production of the new within this actual world. The Dionysian, like the virtual, cannot be accessed directly but is, rather, encountered as actual, individuated, Apolline forms. Or, as Michael Tanner surmises in reference to The Birth of Tragedy, ‘all art comes to us in some form or other, just as all experience is categorized ready for our consumption. That may mean that we never, so long as we survive our confrontations with truth, come into direct confrontation with it’ (2003: xx). In Melville’s novel, the shifting timeframes, diverse locations (Britain, Italy, and Scotland, Paris and Amsterdam, Jordan and Palestine, Suriname and South America) and interwoven plotlines of a sprawling cast of characters indicate a Dionysian impulse towards the unravelling of strict individuation. Family lines intersect (one plotline suggests that Kahled and Donny may in fact be halfbrothers), racial ambiguity unsettles (Ella’s fellow ballerinas cannot quite place

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her because of her skin colour – her family ‘had a kaleidoscopic mix of racial features, African, Amerindian, Dutch and Indonesian’ [Melville 2009: 131] – and ultimately she quits the Royal Ballet because of their decision not to cast her as one of the four cygnets in Swan Lake because her ‘coffee-coloured skin’ [259] would not fit with ‘the look of the production’ [257–8]) and gender identities are blurred (notably in the cross-dressing character of Felix Caspers). However, more significantly, I would argue, the philosophy of aesthetics offered by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy accounts for the distinctive function of Victor in Eating Air. He clearly and almost self-consciously adheres to his illusions in the face of a reality of ‘terrifying ogres, potential murderers, random violence, pagan coincidences and meaningless events’ (294), and yet he stands apart from characters like Shahid who express their absolute convictions through images of transcendence – ‘Did you see that young Muslim sentenced to death for the Bali bombing? On television I watched him. […] As I watched him I saw the bricks of the judicial court around him crumble in the face of his belief ’ (76). As John Gray has argued, what unites radical Islam and revolutionary Marxism is their faith that a somewhat defined but not yet disclosed reality will be brought about through struggle. What, then, distinguishes this group from Victor who so willingly submits to the ‘blissful deception’ (Nietzsche 2003: 102) of his own illusions? The difference comes into focus, I contend, by understanding the role played in Nietzsche’s work by the figure that Deleuze identified as the true opponent of Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy: Socrates.10 Nietzsche begins to sketch his portrait of this new opposition, surprisingly perhaps since The Bacchae is the only surviving Greek tragedy about Dionysus, with Euripides.11 Yet, the poet’s last drama signalled a shift in his aesthetics: ‘a poet who has heroically resisted Dionysus throughout his whole life, only to end his career by glorifying his opponent’ (Nietzsche 2003: 60). We have already seen how the fate of Pentheus in The Bacchae mirrors the dismemberment of Dionysus and, thus, underpins the tragedy, as Nietzsche would define it (in other words, as a crossing between the Apolline and the Dionysian). However, his earlier dramas were characterized, according to Nietzsche, by an aesthetic Socratism: plot and action driven by reason; the use of the prologue to explain characters and their relations, and to provide context and signal the unfolding of the drama to come. This aesthetic naturalism, ‘the chief law of which is, more or less: “to be beautiful everything must first be intelligible” […] [is] a parallel to the Socratic dictum: “only the one who knows is virtuous”’ (62). Where the Apolline artwork gives expression to a higher, more perfect representation of

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the everyday forms to which it corresponds, the Socratic artist values realism and seeks to reproduce without embellishment an image of the empirical world. From the perspective of critique, on the other hand, Nietzsche argues that for the Socratic critic world literature is simply a vast archive to be catalogued and corrected rather than creatively engaged with: ‘in vain does the whole of “world literature” gather around modern man as a consolation to him. […] He remains eternally hungry, the “critic” without pleasure or strength, Alexandrian man, at bottom a librarian and a corrector of proofs, wretchedly blinded by the dust of his tomes and by printing errors’ (89).12 This, then, is the true opposite of the Dionysian world-image, an image that is ‘utterly irrational, full of causes without apparent effects, effects without apparent causes’ (67). This, of course, is what Victor encounters in Eating Air before returning, once again, to his Apolline illusions and to work on his play, Dionysus Revisited. While the novel does not give us enough of Victor’s play to allow us to consider its aesthetic effects, it does precipitate his tragic end – hanged ‘from the flies of the Royal Court Theatre. Nobody was ever quite sure whether or not he had clambered up there to check on the piece of loose scenery that wrecked his first night or whether he was overcome by failure, debt and the loss of political direction’ (Melville 2009: 402). Death in Eating Air is almost always depicted as ‘utterly irrational’, to recall Nietzsche – the precise cause of Victor’s death is unknown; Hector is unexpectedly galled by a wild boar while walking with his daughter, Dawn; Felix’s attempt to avenge his father by flying a plane into the Amsterdam headquarters of the bank which has ruined him goes horribly wrong as he mistakes a residential tower block for his target and crashes into the Zuidermeer estates with a plane (unbeknownst to him) carrying ‘fifty gallons of DMMP, a component of sarin nerve gas’ (387).13 In his inexplicable death, then, Victor ‘revisits’ the Dionysian abyss that he first experienced on the train. In other words, he can be associated with both the Apolline, in his grand illusions, and the Dionysian. The Socratic world view, on the other hand, is, in The Birth of Tragedy, rational, ordered and ideological. It is driven by ‘the unshakable belief that rational thought, guided by causality, can penetrate to the depths of being, and that it is capable of not only knowing but even of correcting being’ (Nietzsche 2003: 73), and it is upon such grounds that we build our ‘moral and religious sentiments’ (108). Indeed, it is this interrogation of criticality that can be read in Albert Camus’s claim that no artist can be a judge: ‘no work of genius has ever been based on hatred and contempt. That is why the artist, in the end of his slow advance, absolves instead of condemning. Instead of being a judge, he is a justifier’ (1995: 266).14 To judge

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is to measure the world against one’s preconceived notions of propriety, and it is, thus, a reactive position of ressentiment. Furthermore, what Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy calls the critical impulse becomes, when read against Melville’s novel and the philosophical perspectives of Gray and Latour, a particularly modern ideological bent. It is not a question of whether or not the actions of the novel’s revolutionaries or terrorists are rational, but to raise once more the significance of the teleological certainty which underlies their decisions; their belief that no other response is possible, and, crucially, that these actions will correct an imperfect world. Melville’s novel is an exploration of revolutionary action and terror, but one that does so, Melville claims, ‘not from the point of view of left or right, but of extremism – whether in love, politics or religion; an attraction to danger against a safer, cosier life’ (Melville cited in Jaggi 2010: n.p.). This ideologically uninflected, Dionysian perspective is clear, for example, in the novel’s depiction of the events in Paris, May 1968, where Hector and Khaled meet for the first time: They first met under a brilliant blue Paris sky on 13 May 1968 – the day on which a whole nation decided to leave the beaten track. No one had seen it coming. […] Hector was eighteen and on his way back to England from Italy where he was an apprentice printer. He caught the mood of exhilaration as he found himself lifted up and carried along in that outburst of pent-up hope for a new future. Medical workers in their white coats, printers, drivers and workers from the Renault factories had taken over the streets of Paris […]. For Hector everything felt clear. His head caught fire and his heart opened up. It was one of those rare moments when people feel they belong to something bigger than themselves, a Dionysiac explosion. (Melville 2009: 31)

There is no particular ideology or revolutionary aim attached to the events of May 1968 in this depiction. Revolution is characterized as an ‘outburst’ and an ‘explosion’ that flies in the face of reason, but not necessarily with the aim of establishing a new political order. As such, it is very different to the calculated actions of Mark and the Islamic terrorists who pointedly consider their targets, their message and the ends that they hope to achieve. It is this latter group that stands in direct opposition to the novel’s Dionysus figure, Donny, a character who is ‘against everything’ (195), who refuses all ideologies and affiliations: ‘Why live in an iron cage when you can get pissed and be free? You and your fucking reasonable world. I don’t belong to it. Do you understand that? […] The

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only thing that guides me in life is … the latest hit song. Or any song that I’ve liked’ (199). He will steal explosives for Mark and the left-wing terrorists, but only ‘for the craic’ (208), not for any political sentiment or conviction: ‘Having moral principles is against everything I believe in. I am against anybody who is for anything. War I don’t mind. It’s patriotism that I hate … All I want to do is wander about the earth. I don’t give a shit about nations or politics or anything’ (193). But Donny’s is a world in which he holds only to the fact that ‘to love nobody and to be loved by nobody, that’s my freedom’ (308), a far from enviable or desirable state. Donny is something beyond everyday reality, an abyssal-like existence that recalls Nietzsche’s claim that the Dionysian is the breaching of a limit, a state that is impossible to reach. Just as Victor intuits that his Apolline illusions are necessary to save him from the nihilism of a world of ‘terrifying ogres, potential murderers, random violence, pagan coincidences and meaningless events’ (294), so the novel hints at the Dionysian life-force only to return to the secure ground of everyday reality. But it makes clear that it is the purpose of art to evoke both sides – the Apolline and the Dionysian – and that it must do so in order to resist the ideological certainties of a narrative in which causes unfold predictably to predetermined ends. Baron S, our fictional narrator, takes up Melville’s desire to explore extremism devoid of reason and ideology. We first meet him at the Head in the Sand café where he is writing ‘the story of these extraordinary events’ (9) and reflecting on the world outside: Daily I watch the tame mass of unresisting citizenry, forming itself into a selfregulated slinking creature, shopping with its eye, endlessly acquisitive, nosing through the streets. Recently the sight has made me restless and impatient. Whenever I come to a set of automatically opening doors I want to rush and throw myself through them before they have a chance to open. People need a little exhilaration, don’t they? […] Something to induce that endorphin spike; a few meteoric moments in the cause of an idea; some extremism to clear the pethidine from the veins? Some danger? Every narrator worth his salt likes a good war. (10)

What might begin as an idea, a cause, is overcome in the Dionysian excess of a moment of exhilaration, of intoxication. Baron S here recognizes the world as a crossroads between Apolline order and Dionysian chaos, a divide that he is well positioned to traverse as a mask of the voodoo Lao, Baron Samedi. With his ‘dark glasses with the right, coffin-shaped lens knocked out’, his ‘black hat, black coat and a silver cane’, all in the ‘style […] of a graveyard dandy’ (9), Baron S

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is immediately recognizable as the Lao who guides the recently deceased into the underworld. He is, therefore, a liminal figure, existing in between life and death, signalling the possibility of resurrection as well as destruction, and, above all, associated with debauchery, disruption and obscenity: in short, a Dionysian figure. He is Nietzsche’s tragic artist, ‘creat[ing] his characters, like a prolific deity of individuation’ (2003: 106) – or as Baron S claims, ‘being a narrator is like being some sort of god. The characters, poor souls, are human’ (Melville 2009: 112) – only to give vent to the ‘tremendous Dionysiac impulse [that] then devours this whole world of phenomena’ (Nietzsche 2003: 106). Art and literature are not simply the calculated, ideologically driven, critical and corrective visions of those who seek to create a world in their own image, but a worlding that unsettles fixed values and forms by gesturing towards an excess. The aim of writing, Baron S argues, is not to correct the world but to ‘upset things a little’ (402); it is not to persuade the reader of the justness of a particular ideology or the veracity of a representation but ‘to set the moral compass spinning’ (383). Finally, it is the character of Ella de Vries who best encapsulates the Nietzschean duality of Apollo and Dionysus. As a ballet dancer, she seems to access what Nietzsche would term the spirit of music: a primal unity evoked beyond language through harmony and rhythm. Ella experiences dance as ‘music communicated directly to the body, beyond the reach of words, […] the pure pleasure of dance’ (170) – a becoming-other that evokes the Dionysian state of unity and indifferentiation. As her Russian dance teacher explains, ‘dancing is prehistoric. Animals dance. You are always half-way between ze human and ze animal. Dance is our craving for expression after we leave behind ze patterned instincts of animals. Here you think only with your body. We live only through ze body’ (155–6). Living only through the body is precisely how Donny lives, reacting to his impulses and immediate desires with no thought of underlying motivations or ideology. The characterization of dance in Eating Air as a Dionysian state finds its clearest articulation in the scene that takes place during ladies’ night at Mambo Racine’s nightclub. The dancers gather there following Ella’s gala performance at Covent Garden Theatre: Any observer could see that this was not going to be a normal dance-club evening with people jigging on the spot. Groups of dancers from their various shows entered into physical dialogue with each other. One set would do a sequence of movements with leaping twists and outrageous high-kicks, half improvised and half taken from the choreography they knew. Another set copied them. […] The DJ watching from above orchestrated tunes that moved the crowd from

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one mood to another. The dancers responded, flooded with an inextinguishable energy that surged up from their feet. […] Even Ella had forgotten the excitement of dance liberated from the constraints of choreography. Below the level of reason the angels and ogres normally kept in the cellar came out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing. (378–9)

In this scene, through dance the individuality of each dancer is blurred as they become an undivided crowd responding as one to the music. The call and response of their dancing disrupts the control of the singular ego and action becomes a communal activity. Above all, it is dance ‘liberated from the constraints of choreography’ – ‘half-improvised’ and half-recalled movements and poses from the dancers’ routines. In other words, it is dance liberated from a controlling narrative but not devoid of any form whatsoever. The dancers depicted here are halfway between the Apolline image and the Dionysian state of communal intoxication. Melville herself imposes a form on this scene to a certain extent insofar as it replays Pentheus’s death in The Bacchae; in this case, it is Felix Caspers who is discovered by the dancers as the uninvited guest at their party. Found dressed as a woman, Felix is set upon by the group in a gesture towards Pentheus’s demise at the hands of his mother: ‘Someone kicked him in the face. The wig was ripped away from him. One woman put her foot on his chest and seized his arm as though to wrench it off. Then people started to claw at his clothes’ (380). However, Melville’s ‘loose re-working’ (408) of The Bacchae, as I have suggested by reading it in tandem with The Birth of Tragedy, exceeds the status of repeated form and reveals the cyclical movement of the Dionysian and Apolline within art. If in evoking John Gray the novel suggests the fallacy of modernity’s purified categories of self and other, subjective and objective, I would add that it also helps us to move beyond Gray’s pessimistic conclusion which states that we would do well to accept conflict and limit our hopes. By allowing Nietzsche to enter the conversation, this dualism is recast as a non-dialectical, persistent play of forces, and art and literature takes on a particular role. Without denying that literature has the capacity to be naturalistic, representative and didactic (the features of Socratic aesthetics), it takes on a greater significance for Nietzsche when it exceeds realism and challenges the fixed structures that purport to regulate our existence. In such a moment, art speaks the Dionysian excess through the voice of Apollo: it creates a world of illusion through which we can partially intuit a sense of the contradictory but unified life beyond representation. Melville gestures towards this in characters

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such as Ella, Donny and Victor who, to different degrees, live something of the Dionysian state. On the ‘Socratic’ side stand Mark, Shahid and Massoud who preside in judgement over life and seek to correct it by bringing about their morally or religiously defined vision of the world. Eating Air explores terror and revolution through a reworking of Euripides’ tragedy and in doing so, I have argued, ventures into the conflict of Apollo and Dionysus as set out in The Birth of Tragedy. Melville creates a literary world of illusion in which the Dionysian finds expression as the undoing of strict individuations or purified categories. In this way, Melville returns the argument of this chapter back to Latour, who not merely offers a critique of modernity and a Casanova-style structuring of the world literary field, but grounds his philosophy on a Nietzschean vision of a world of competing forces and overcomes the Kantian distinction between representation and reality.

The sociology of a postcolonial world literature Eating Air illustrates for us the modern fallacy of purified regimes and of the Great Divide which moderns hold separates ‘us’ and ‘them’. But through its association with The Birth of Tragedy, it can be read as gesturing towards a world conceived as the ebb and flow of immanent forces, and as a caution to those who would seek to reduce the work of literature to the mapping out of a priori structures, as a reflection of a more fundamental social reality, or as the expression of ideology pure and simple. Art and literature, rather, trouble the certainty of a strict correspondence and hierarchy between representation and the real because, as a play of forces, the Apolline form is unsettled by its Dionysian counterpart. Furthermore, as the narrator claims, it is the role of art to give access to the Dionysian abyss, to unsettle the fixed structures of the world and not to correct life by deference to a higher standard of judgement or teleological aim. Melville’s novel, in other words, presents us with a world in which resistance and revolution are freed from a strictly ideological prescription of telos or structure and are simply the immanent capacity of a world that is assembled, dissembled and reassembled through the ceaseless play of active and reactive forces. Consider once more the reluctance of WReC to foreground resistance within a critical reading of world literature: ‘the literary “registration” of the world-system does not (necessarily) involve criticality or dissent’ (2015: 20). The issue of dissent will be the focus of Chapter Three, but for now it is

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worth dwelling on the Latourian response to such a claim. Given Latour’s characterization of the social as nothing other than a network of actors, actors which are nothing other than an assemblage of forces, forces which in the Nietzschean sense can be characterized (but not in advance) as either active or reactive, as Dionysian disorder or Apolline coherence, then an account of that world that does not articulate dissent is an incomplete, partial and weak account. If the world is both order and chaos then an account which details only the registration of that order is, by definition, insufficient. At best, it is a form of literary criticism that appropriates the Apolline image without recognizing that, in the end, ‘Apollo finally speaks the language of Dionysus’ (Nietzsche 2003: 104). At worst, it is Socratic criticality driven by the conviction that all art will conform to the assumed structure of being or thought which the critic held from the outset. This is precisely the post-critical charged levelled against critics like Fredric Jameson, who seek not merely to uncover the latent meaning of a work of literature but to criticize or correct that work to the extent that it confirms the ideological position assumed by the critic; or, as Nietzsche writes of the Socratic position, the critic possesses ‘the unshakable belief that rational thought, guided by causality, can penetrate to the depths of being, and that is it capable of not only knowing but even of correcting being’ (73). Rita Felski’s characterization of the problem at the heart of critical theory on both sides of the materialist/ poststructuralist divide rests upon the assumptions of a world view that takes for granted the assuredness of the critic’s ideological positioning. As Felski argues of that critical divide: Both methods […] treat a text as an inert object to be scrutinized rather than a phenomenon to be engaged. […] A work of art is a potential source of knowledge rather than just an object of knowledge – one whose cognitive impact and implications are tied up with its affective reach. […] Yet these texts are more than the sum of our projections: they can surprise or startle us, nudge us into unexpected moods or states of mind, cause us to do things we had not anticipated. Reading, in this sense, is neither a matter of digging below resistant ground nor an equanimous tracing out of textual surface. Rather, it is a cocreation between actors that leaves neither party unchanged. (Felski 2015: 84)

In other words, much is lost by those who view the text as a compendium of clues that will enable the careful critic to trace the literary registration of a more fundamental social reality, repressed psychological state or essential lack. The spirit of negation that, in Felski’s view, unites the various factions of

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contemporary critical theory is a measure of reactive forces in Nietzschean terms, an expression of ressentiment insofar as it judges the text against a measure of what it is not, what it fails to readily show and thus what the critic must uncover as its implicit subtext. That, of course, is to wholly overlook the fact that page one, paragraph one of The Limits of Critique draws attention to Nietzsche as a philosopher, alongside Freud and Marx, culpable for the state of critical inquiry today. Returning to Latour, however, whose own philosophy Felski credits with initiating the post-critical turn, we can begin to better appreciate Nietzsche’s role within the constructivist, creative and affirmational model of literary criticism envisioned by Felski in the extract. Although Nietzsche’s account of Dionysus and Apollo might, on face value, suggest a polarization of separate regimes – the Dionysian as the hidden truth within the Apolline image – as John Sallis has argued, this is to misconstrue the relationality of Nietzsche’s philosophy and to overlook his radical break from Kantianism (cf. Sallis 1991: 32). The Apolline and the Dionysian are not constrained by a logic of opposition or dialectical sublation, ‘but a logic of excess’ (Sallis 1991: 57). Relationality is foregrounded in this model, and the Dionysian excess is privileged as a source of productive disorder and the dissemblance of the Apolline form, and as the trigger for its reassemblage in new, unpredictable and unforeseen ways. Felski’s reiteration of Paul Ricoeur’s suspicion against Nietzschean aesthetics overlooks the vital role it has to play in Latour’s own thought, most notably his understanding of a world that is a temporary construction grounded in the play of forces. Felski could be forgiven for downplaying the Nietzschean dimension within Latour’s thought. In his reluctance to prescribe in advance what any actor or force actually is, Latour’s work holds back from fully following the philosophical implications of newness and change within the evolution of actors in his relational sociology: ‘I offer no a-priori definition of what is strong and what is weak. I start with the assumption that everything is involved in a relation of forces but that I have no idea at all precisely what a force is’ (Latour 1993b: 7); ‘We cannot say that an actant follows rules, laws, or structures, but neither can we say that it acts without these’ (160). In these claims, the constructivism of Latour’s philosophy is clear: we cannot assume any a priori ontological framework that precedes an actor and into which they are placed, but, like Victor in Melville’s tale, that does not plunge us into the undifferentiated chaos of the Dionysian abyss. As we have seen, for Latour, society does not refer to a pre-given structure or state of affairs but a process of making and remaking networks of association: this is the heart of his philosophy of forces and his actor-network theory.15

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Turning from forces to actors, Latour defines the latter as nothing more than their relations.16 Freed from a priori structures of thought, the actor for Latour cannot be apprehended by any other means than its relation, it is registered only through the connections it makes and the transformations it induces, but not because it is some inaccessible reality beyond consciousness (the Kantian thing-in-itself). To use the literary example that Latour himself employs in The Pasteurization of France, on Crusoe’s island actors emerge everywhere and in diverse forms: the castaway imperialist Crusoe and the native he names Friday, the birds and animals which they encounter, but also the plant life that provides shelter, and even the storm itself which brings Crusoe to the island; the whole eco-system in fact. In the case of each actor we can trace an effect; the storm causes the wrecking of the ship and it is therefore an actor in Latour’s sense of the term.17 Rejecting the privileging of the human over the non-human as well as any a priori cogito, Latour’s actor-network theory presupposes no primary individual that exists prior to or beyond its actions. Actors are defined solely by their actions and, crucially, by the registration of those actions on the part of other actors: ‘there is no other way to define an actor but through its action, and there is no other way to define action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, or created by the character that is the focus of attention’ (1999: 122). Human and non-human, individual and collective, the effects of actors are felt everywhere. To return to the image of Crusoe set out above, as an actor Crusoe creates a world and, we might add, Robinson Crusoe, the text, also creates its own world. As actors, both demonstrate the capacity to affect others (Crusoe transforms the island; Robinson Crusoe shapes Ian Watt’s account of the novel). Both create an assemblage, a network through which a new society can be traced, and enact a process in which the actor ‘translates all the other forces on its own behalf, and it seeks to make them accept the version of itself that it would like them to translate’ (1993b: 166). Crusoe as actor, in other words, is not only creating his own world but locates himself and all others within a hierarchy, and seeks to make others accept it. This is the point at which Latour’s actor-network theory begins to incorporate a sense of how power operates within society without recourse to primary causes such as capitalism, God or nature. Latour recognizes that the following objection might be raised against his relational philosophy: without objective truths or a priori causes which underlie, explain and verify phenomena, is it not the case that the analyst could make any claim of the world? Or, in other words, is actor-network theory a case of anything

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goes? Well, yes and no. ‘We can say anything we please, and yet we cannot. As soon as we have spoken and rallied words, other alliances become easier or more difficult. […] Some meanings are suggested, while others are taken away; we are commented upon, deduced, understood, or ignored. That’s it: we can no longer say whatever we please’ (182). We can say what we like, but if those claims fall on deaf ears then those words will have limited reach. This is because the strength or weakness of an actor is a measure of their network, the extent of their capacity to connect, mediate and transform. Thus, Crusoe must make others accept his version of society and, in doing so, entice them to take it forward in another mediation. Crusoe as imperialist is only powerful to the extent that his social arrangement is accepted: ‘There is only one way in which an actor can prove its power. It has to make those in whose name it spoke speak and show that they all say the same thing’ (196). We saw a version of this earlier in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: the ewuguwu, who, as arbiters of tribal justice, speak in the name of the tribe, are accepted by the tribe’s people who may have otherwise pointed out the artificiality of the ritual. In turn, the waning of tribal culture and rise of imperial power is attributed in the novel to the capacity of the Europeans to undermine native religious beliefs and cultural practices: as Obierika laments ‘our clan can no longer act as one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart’ (1962: 124–5). The tribe can no longer ‘show that they all say the same thing’ and their network falls apart. In this respect, actor-network theory is not a case of anything goes. Accounts are either supported or dismissed, much in the same way suggested by Franco Moretti in his defence of distant reading. Faced with resistance to his idea of a literary criticism drawn entirely from second-hand accounts and without a single close reading of the text itself, his response is simply that if one source is wrong it will not be supported by other commentators: it will be revealed as a weak claim because it is not taken up, engaged with, supported or extended by others.18 Literary criticism is the act of telling a story, of creating an assemblage and of refiguring the social in such a way that it ‘may become again a circulating entity that is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being part of society’ (Latour 2007: 128). In Latour’s hands, the distinction between national and world literatures cannot be limited to a text’s geographical point of origin, since every text makes its own world. Rather, ‘the words “local” and “global” offer points of view on networks that are by nature neither local nor global, but are more or less long and more or less connected’ (Latour 1993a: 122). World literature can be properly attributed to texts that assemble a network

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that involves a greater number of connections and implicates a larger number of actors than can be found in local literatures. This, then, is not so distant from Casanova’s field theory in which literary capital is a measure of the global reach, critical esteem and aesthetic innovation of the work in question. In both models, the global reach of the text is key to its status as world literature. The important distinction, however, is that for Latour the literary field is not the cause of these relations, nor does it exist as an external framework into which the literary text can be situated. The literary field, we might say, is one point of view on the wider network which is continually being reassembled and refigured by an incalculable array of human and non-human actors. The ‘world’ of world literature is therefore always implicated in a process of reconstitution, with each new mediating text offering a new account of the social assemblage. There is a certain imperialist force at work within all actors and, by extension, all literature. All actors create and order a world which will persist only insofar as other actors perpetuate it by taking it forward in acts of translation which have the least possible degree of transformation. Without an a priori ground or transcendent cause underpinning being, Latour’s ontology is wholly relational – to exist is to be active in acts of translation or, simply, to speak. But it is also to speak for others and to render silent those that might challenge you. This is where Latourian philosophy takes a distinctly Nietzschean turn, offering us a world of forces struggling for dominance.19 ‘A force becomes potent only if it speaks for others, if it can make those it silenced speak when called upon to demonstrate its strength, and if it can force those who challenged it to confess that indeed it was saying what its allies would have said’ (1993b: 197). Far from seeing power as something derived from pre-existing systems, such as capitalism, or causes, such as class, gender or race, Latour maintains that it is a measure of the network in which the actor sustains itself. Denying the ‘System’ or the subject, however, is not to say that Latour rejects the idea that there are processes at work which are ‘systematizing’; ‘everywhere there are forces that oblige others to play the way they have always played’ (Latour 1993b: 198). Rather, capital, class, gender and race can be viewed as themselves actors that shape a world and the possibilities for other actors within it to connect, translate and speak. Key to this matter is Latour’s characterization of systematizing processes which ‘oblige others to play the way they have always played’. Despite Graham Harman’s argument that Latour’s relational philosophy lacks a principle of conatus and thus presents a world that is a perpetual present in which nothing persists across time and in its being (cf. Harman 2009: 112), it is in this notion of force or obliging others

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that we find Latour’s sense of an actor’s persistence. That permanence is not tied to an a priori or transcendent cause, but is rather the effect of existing within a world of relation. ‘As it associates elements together’, Latour explains, ‘every actor has a choice: to extend further, risking dissidence and dissociation, or to reinforce consistency and durability, but not go too far’ (1993b: 198). An actor may become more powerful by extending its network further and further, by incorporating more allies and convincing them to accept their world, but in doing so it increases the chances that some other actor will rebel against it. Similarly, an actor might limit their network in order to gain durability, but in doing so risks being forced into silence. Extending Latour’s philosophy, it is not that the subaltern cannot speak in the literal sense, but simply that there is no position within the network of relations for them to do so; no actors that will allow them to be heard. And with this ‘potency’ of force, the ability of one actor to speak for or make silent another, ‘injustice also begins. […] Monads are born free, and everywhere they remain in chains’ (174). This is the radical democracy of Latour’s philosophy, something that he shares, as we shall see in Chapter Four, with Jacques Rancière: inequality is not a given fact of the overarching system into which an actor takes up its place, but something continually produced and, as such, open to the potential of refiguring and change within the perpetual workings of translation. Felski would likely agree with WReC’s foreclosure of dissent as a necessary component of critique; indeed, for Felski, ‘all too often, we see critics tying themselves into knots in order to prove that a text harbors signs of dissonance and dissent – as if there were no other conceivable way of justifying its merits’ (2005: 17). However, just as there is no ontologically valid position to argue that ‘a text harbors signs of dissonance and dissent’, the reverse position is also true: there is no validity to the claim that a text does not ‘harbor signs of dissonance and dissent’. To be sure, harbouring suggests the digging-down approach that Latour seeks to resist, but by shifting focus to the world that the text creates and to the work of translation undertaken between text and reader in the co-creative act of reading, then it is no longer a question of whether a text does or does not register or harbour signs of dissent. If we take Latour at his Nietzschean word, then, as the creation of a network involving reader, writer and world, the text is an assemblage of forces of which we cannot say in advance whether they are active or reactive, dissident or conforming. The work of literature or art, then, emerges as either Apolline or Dionysian or both through the co-creative act of reading and not through authorial intention. As in the case of Pauline

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Melville’s novel, the work of art is an expression of the work’s capacity to ‘set the moral compass spinning’ (2009: 383) but not in the name of a selected ideology. Rather than post-critical thinking, Graham Harman proposes ‘hyperbolic thinking’ (2009: 120) as a Latourian alternative to the ressentiment of modern critique: a critical exercise in exploring not where a book is wrong, misguided or ignorant, but how it might create alternative worlds: ‘Such questions restore the proper scale of evaluation for intellectual work: demoting the pushy careerist sandbagger who remains within the bounds of the currently plausible and prudent, and promoting the gambler who uncovers new worlds’ (Harman 2009: 120). This push beyond the status quo, without falling into the trap of telos, is the dissident force of postcolonial critique: finding in the literary text not confirmation of the structural permanence of imperialism, but the means to imagine a new society beyond the colonizer and the colonized. Thus, for Harman, the effectiveness of the literary text is not simply a measure of the widest possible agreement or its literary capital; it need not convince actors of the practicality or verifiability of the world constructed in its pages: ‘The books that stir us most are not those containing the fewest errors, but those that throw most light on unknown portions of the map’ (Harman 2009: 120). The risk of the ‘gambler’ rather than the certainties of the Socratic critic: in this statement we can trace where the Nietzschean underpinnings of Latour’s work elaborate his aesthetics. The text can provoke resistance and dissent; it can present a reimagined world through which the reader might reevaluate their own. This is a constructivist view of dissent, one that emerges through a NietzscheanLatourian perspective. By extension, Latour’s sociology is a far-reaching critique of both the Bourdieuian field theory that underpins Casanova’s hierarchical literary republic and the Wallersteinian application of combined and uneven development as a means to account for its inherent inequality. If, for Latour, contradictions are ‘negotiated’ and ‘built’ rather than inherent, total or given, so must any structural inequality be one that is continually reconstructed within a world that too is under constant recreation. In other words, what unites Bourdieu and Wallerstein, and thus what explains Casanova’s ‘programmatic’ (Thorne 2013: 59) application of the two, is their commitment to a primary and purifying theory of socialization. To recall Latour, ‘when [Bourdieu] speaks of fields of power, then science, technology, texts, and the contents of activities disappear’ (1993a: 6). By making the social, for Bourdieu, or capitalism, for Wallerstein, the primary and a priori ground from which a particular state of affairs is viewed and understood, sociology purifies the division between

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nature and culture. We might argue, in turn, that the reason that Casanova’s application of Bourdieuian field theory within her account of the world literary republic will never resolve the thorny issue of the relation between text and context is because when Casanova speaks of the literary field as a field of power, the text itself disappears. Bourdieu and Wallerstein are not as incompatible as Thorne (2013) implies, since both assume a fixed social framework as the a priori condition that determines a state of affairs. Casanova’s world republic, therefore, not only restates the paradoxical temporality of modern critique by posing a teleology that is at once unified as a single, universal movement and fractured by the Great Divide that differentiates the moderns from the rest, but also repeats the error of modern sociology, as Latour conceives it. Casanova’s sociology of literature assumes a structural framework within which any and all literary texts will, in a second moment, emerge. Although not directly the object of his inquiry, second wave postcolonialism too is open to the charge of modern thinking as defined by Latour. Benita Parry’s condemnation of the discourse analysts Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak points towards the issue: Those who have been or are still engaged in colonial struggles against contemporary forms of neo-colonialism could well read the theorizing of discourse analysts with considerable disbelief at the construction this puts on the situation they are fighting against and the contest in which they are engaged. This is not a charge against the difficulty of the analyses but an observation that these alternative narratives of colonialism obscure the ‘murderous and decisive struggle between two protagonists’, and discount or write out the counterdiscourses which every liberation movement has recorded. The significant differences in the critical practices of Spivak and Bhabha are submerged in a shared programme marked by the exorbitation of discourse and a related incuriosity about the enabling socio-economic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis. Furthermore, because their theses admit of no point outside of discourse from which opposition can be engendered, their project is concerned to place incendiary devices within the dominant structures of representation and not to confront these with a different knowledge. (Parry 2004: 26)

This polemic encapsulates the impasse between the two strands of postcolonial theory that have dominated the field since its inception in the late 1970s – poststructuralist and Marxist. For Parry, by failing to confront colonialist knowledge with a different knowledge, there can be no dialectical movement from

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alienation towards postcolonial freedom; by dealing only in representation, they will never reach the real world of political action. But from a poststructuralist perspective it makes no sense to view ‘a different knowledge’ as something that exists ‘outside of discourse’, since beyond language or discourse is only a lack we cannot access. This is precisely the state of critical theory as outlined by Latour: the scientists, who deal in natural facts, admonish the sociologists’ obsession with the social; the sociologists despair at the poststructuralists who obsess over discourse, which is an empty substitute for reality. Purifying theories are totalizing and posit a single concept (society, capitalism, class) as its core organizing principle. This understanding, David Alworth notes, is apparent in the work of the founding father of sociology, Émile Durkheim, who in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life argued that ‘totality is but the abstract form of the concept of society: that whole which includes all things, that supreme class under which all other classes must be subsumed’ (cited in Alworth 2016: 3). This quote, Alworth observes, serves as the epigraph to one of the most influential works of contemporary Marxist literary theory, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. ‘For Jameson’, Alworth argues, ‘the literary text expresses – often through gaps, elisions, repressions, all that “remain[s] unrealized in the surface of the texts” – the history, politics, and ideology of the society from which it has emerged’ (2016: 3). Now Jameson is perhaps not quite the right target in this respect. Indeed, I would go as far as to suggest that in his earlier work, most notably in The Prison-House of Language, which takes its epigraph from Latour’s favoured philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jameson foreshadows Latour’s critique of deconstruction and the work of purification. As he argues in The Prison-House of Language, structuralism simply reformulates the Kantian division of phenomena and the thing-in-itself as the signifier and the signified. Poststructuralism follows suit by preserving the notion of an a priori system but introduces a sense of lack by conceptualizing the signified as an inaccessible beyond, a move that is ‘essentially a replay of the Kantian dilemma of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself ’ (Jameson 1974: 109). The result is a philosophical outlook which projects essentially distinct and opposed categories and a single, predetermined underlying system onto being: ‘as in Kant also, the separation of these mental processes from reality encourages an explicit search for the permanent structures of the mind itself, the organizational categories and forms through which the mind is able to experience the world, or to organize meaning in what is essentially in itself meaningless’ (109). At the close of Prison-House, Jameson anticipates a Latourian solution. Drawing,

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like Latour, on Greimas, Jameson takes forward the concept of signification as meaning produced through a process of mediation and translation, what he calls transcoding: Truth as transcoding, as translation from one code to another […]. This would be a perfectly exact formal definition of the process of arriving at truth, even though it would presuppose nothing about the content of that truth, nor would it necessarily imply that every such transcoding operation results in a trutheffect of equal strength or ‘validity’. Yet such a formula would have the advantage […] of freeing structural analysis from the myth of structure itself, of some permanent and spatial-like organization of the object. […] It would thus for the first time permit the description of the Structuralist procedure as a genuine hermeneutics. (216)

Transcoding as the creation of truth-effects takes us some distance from the Durkheim-inspired sociology of literature that Alworth finds in Jameson. In the latter, the literary text represents a more fundamental totality (society with all its history, politics, and ideologies) that precedes it. To be sure, this critical approach has had notable purchase and I would argue that in the hands of Casanova, Franco Moretti and, most recently WReC, world literature, like postcolonial literature in its second wave moment, has been approached via a sociology of literature in which literature is a reflection of underlying social, political and historical contexts. However, Jameson’s hermeneutics is a rejection of the idea that a single, permanent structure can be identified as the cause of being. This does not mean that for Jameson there is no consistency to world history. On the contrary, the work of the hermeneutical critic becomes the activity of ‘disclosing the presence of pre-existing codes’ but in such a way as to account for ‘the place of the analyst’ and in this way ‘reopen text and analytic process alike to all the winds of history’ (216). This seems to me to be quite distinct from the account of second wave postcolonial criticism offered above, which threatens to reduce the text to mere superstructure. By arguing for the reopening of the text to a process of translation in which meaning is produced as a ‘truth-effect’ freed ‘from the myth of structure’, Jameson reimagines hermeneutics at the end of Prison-House and in doing so foreshadows Latour’s later work on modernity and literature. Rejecting the notion of literature as the reflection of pre-existing society, Latour rethinks the sociology of literature: ‘a new sociology of literature that would seek to apprehend the sociology in literature: the way that literary texts assemble an impression of social form’ (Alworth 2016: 4); ‘Society is

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not presupposed as a cause, then, but understood as the effect of how actors assemble, disassemble, and reassemble anew’ (12). Literary criticism becomes an activity of observing the social as it is reimagined in the text itself, but not in order to confirm a permanent structure or field. Negotiating the divide between representation and reality the literary text is cast as a hybrid mediator, a work of translation (even if read in the original language) and active participant in the creation of the social and, indeed, the world. Latour’s philosophy, in other words, can furnish a sociology of world literature understood as relation and as the ebb and flow of forces, but one which resists the critical tendency to project underlying structures or prefigured ideological ends onto the literary text. It is only by understanding the literary text as a worlding in which forces both active and reactive are operative that world literature and postcolonial studies alike can overcome the poststructuralist–materialist impasse and be reframed as critical projects that engage in the productive, revisionary and dissident capacity of all works of literature.

3

Globalizing Dissent: Active Resistance and the Politics of Relation in Postcolonial and World Literatures

Dissent is the recurring theme traced across the literary works discussed in this book: from the wizened youth’s mocking protestations against Father Urrutia’s rhetoric of innocence in Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile to Pauline Melville’s Baron S, the narrator, who aims ‘to set the moral compass spinning’ (2009: 383) in Eating Air, and, as we shall see in the final chapter, the defiant figure of Antigone as reimagined by Kamila Shamsie in Home Fire. For some, postcolonial and world literary criticism have been judged and found wanting with respect to their political capacity as dissident forces: both postcolonial literature and theory have been attacked for either too little or too close an association with national politics and decolonization movements; while, according to the editors of the literary magazine n+1, world literature is complicit with global capitalism and ‘has become an empty vessel for the occasional self-ratification of the global elite, who otherwise mostly ignore it. […] Today’s World Lit is more like a Davos summit where experts, national delegates, and celebrities discuss, calmly and collegially, between sips of bottled water, the terrific problems of a humanity whose predicament they appear to have escaped’ (n+1 editors 2013: n.p.).1 The critique of world literature offered by this editorial is directed by a conviction, like that of Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters, that political action must necessarily stem – directly, immediately – from local contexts. As such, literature to the extent that it is political must be particular, or, from Casanova’s perspective, overdetermined by its close proximity to the national narrative. For Casanova, as we saw in Chapter One, this view makes of political and, especially, postcolonial literatures an aesthetic form distant from the world literary republic: in short, it is national not world literature. However, the editors take a looser view of world literature in general and identify a

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break in the overarching evolution of the field from Goethe to contemporary figures like Junot Díaz or Teju Cole. Broadly speaking, they argue that from Romanticism to postcolonialism literature was formed under the spectre of political revolution, in the shadow of which writers and poets (Percy Shelley is their particular example) mounted their attacks against national figures in an attempt to ‘radically reorder […] the nation state’ (n.p.). Postcolonial literatures, by this account, can more accurately be described as a body of anti-imperialist, decolonial texts, associated, that is, with a period characterized by the struggle for national self-determination by colonized peoples. Indeed, postcolonialism itself splits as a literary field according to this analysis, as exemplified by the career of Salman Rushdie who, with Midnight’s Children, offered ‘a genuinely angry book […] outraged by the [Indian] Emergency’ (n.p.), but, by The Satanic Verses, had slipped towards global themes of migration, abstracted notions of hybridity and universalist claims for free speech. ‘Following The Satanic Verses, the association of postcolonial writing with anti-imperialism was dead’ and in its place emerged the global novel, in which political themes are ‘pried from their local context’ and located ‘elsewhere, in some distant geography and irrecoverable past. Present day confusions and controversies are neglected or sentimentalized’ (n.p.). This projection ‘elsewhere’ recalls, for the postcolonial theorist at least, the work of the Martinican poet and philosopher, Édouard Glissant, most notably his Caribbean Discourse in which he bemoans the strategies of ‘diversion’ of those who look ‘elsewhere for the principles of domination’ (Glissant 1989: 20). In the chapter titled ‘The Known, the Uncertain’, Glissant traces the reactions of a people who have been forced or have chosen to migrate to another country: ‘The first impulse of a transplanted population […] is that of reversion. Reversion is the obsession with a single origin: one must not alter the absolute state of being. To revert is to consecrate permanence, to negate contact’ (16). The impulse of reversion, then, is a denial of cultural hybridity or creolization: it maintains an ideal of a pure culture of origin and strives to maintain that culture to the extent that it negates any change or influence that results from ‘contact’ with another. Colonization can make that encounter a violent and oppressive interaction, of course, but Glissant is wary of forgoing cultural hybridity in favour of a valorized original, precolonial identity because it simply enforces the colonial ideology which forever opposes colonizer and colonized. In the Caribbean in particular, ‘the memory of the ancestral country fades’ (18) because it is almost impossible for a New World slave to sustain their tribal identity in an environment in which

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that identity is not only suppressed but also not widely shared among other slaves. As such, ‘populations transplanted by the slave trade were not capable of maintaining for any length of time the impulse to revert’ and so followed ‘the practice of diversion’ (18). Diversion is a reactive force; it is, to apply Deleuze’s description of ressentiment in Nietzsche and Philosophy, ‘an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it’; ‘the speculation of the pleb, [...] the way of thinking of the slave’ (Deleuze 2006: 9). Whether it is the colonial mimic who seeks to assimilate the cultural values of the colonizer or the slave who subverts the master’s authority by ‘tak[ing] possession of the language imposed by his master, a simplified language […] and makes this simplification even more extreme […] we shall see if you can make sense of it’ (Glissant 1989: 20), both positions are defined by the force against which it reacts, which dominates it. This is as much a characteristic of the master as it is of the slave, for Deleuze, since the master depends upon the recognition of his power by an external other and thus is also in a reactive position. For Glissant, the creole language as a systemized version of the ‘simplified language’ of the plantation was developed as a ‘strategy of trickery’ (21), aimed at obscuring a slave’s meaning, and as such was a ‘linguistic reaction’ (21) that had ‘fundamentally incorporated the derisive nature of its formation’ (20). By the same token, the ‘universal identification with black suffering in the Caribbean ideology (or the poetics) of negritude’ (24) is another form of reactive diversion insofar as it preserves, in reversed form, the dialectical structure of colonization and looks elsewhere for the primary source of identification. Diversion can only become an affirmative, active force when, as was the case with Haitian Creole, it ‘evolve[s] beyond the trickster strategy’ (21), when it no longer operates ‘as if the Other is listening’ (22). This necessitates, I argue, a transition beyond the oppositional politics of anticolonial resistance towards a new, postcolonial subjectivity open to the active forces of creation and newness, a becoming-Caribbean, becomingpostcolonial. But this poses a problem for the fractured model of postcolonial and world literary studies outlined by the editors of n+1. Politics for them is, as it is for Pascale Casanova, exclusively that of national struggle. This is precisely the root of Casanova’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka: the close proximity of small literatures to politics in Kafka is one in which individual concerns become collective as the writer ‘seeks to politicize (which is to say, to nationalize)’ (Casanova 2004: 201. Emphasis added). By associating Kafka with minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari ‘project upon Kafka their view of politics

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as subversion, or “subversive struggle”, whereas for him, in the Prague of the early twentieth century, it was identified solely with the national question’ (203–4). Leaving aside the wholly questionable assertion embedded in this quotation that what Kafka really thought about politics and the ‘national question’ of his day is an effective way to counter Deleuze’s philosophy, Casanova proceeds to dismiss Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature as a misrepresentation of Kafka’s comments on literature. In her wake, Christopher Prendergast happily proclaims that ‘Casanova junks the Deleuzian assimilation of small to minority as a category-mistake, producing an image of Kafka as a prophetic revolutionary quite at odds with his real preoccupations’ (2004: 15). Casanova’s focus is exclusively on Deleuze and Guattari’s co-authored Kafka, in which ‘minor’ is proposed as ‘the revolutionary condition of all literature’ rather than being aligned with specific literary or national contexts, a distinction that allows Deleuze and Guattari to read Kafka, Casanova claims, as ‘a political author who had no real political interests, who did not care about the burning political questions of his time’ (2004: 204) (i.e. nationalism). However, Deleuze’s philosophy of resistance cannot be so easily dismissed for a lack of specificity. Later in this chapter I will draw on his readings of Herman Melville in Essays Critical and Clinical as a means to read J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg as an exploration of the forces of dissent and resistance that may either settle into the oppositional logic of ressentiment or transform current possibilities through the active forces of creation. Indeed, this is precisely where Casanova’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari lies, since ‘they hold that Kafka was political, but only in a prophetic way; he spoke of politics, but only for the future, as if he foresaw and described events to come’ (Casanova 2004: 204). As we have seen with Glissant, there is a distinction to be drawn between a politics of nationalist struggle which maintains the structured opposition of colonizer and colonized, and the creation of a self-determining people who no longer ‘function as if the Other is listening’ (1989: 22). It is not enough, then, to simply characterize politics as nationalism without calling into question what is at stake in that struggle. Indeed, Deleuze in ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’ reflects upon the American Revolution and finds in the event both the cementing of the nation-state as a source of law, authority and fixed forms of identification (all majoritarian concepts for Deleuze) and the potential for minor-becomings – for new forms of alliance and affiliation that escape the logic of pure and uncontested roots or filiation. As this suggests, this is precisely where Glissant’s postcolonial philosophy seeks to lead us: a rejection of original, unchanging and legitimating racial and cultural origins as the

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reversional ideology of the imperialist mindset. Glissant’s positive sense of diversion demands much more than a politics of nation-building tied only to the processes of decolonization; it asks us to consider how a people freed from political colonization might also free themselves from the ontological condition of ressentiment that both colonization and its resistance produced. The Deleuzian ‘minor’ is misunderstood as a deterritorialization pure and simple. Minor literature pushes language towards its outside; it presents us with characters marked by an excess or radical otherness which troubles secure world views, but it does so by throwing ‘a livid white light on [its] surroundings’ (Deleuze 1997: 83), on its world. It is the creation of a symptomatology of this actual world not as the uncovering of a hidden or unconscious structural cause but as the creation of a new understanding of a particular state of affairs. Minor literature does not simply reflect the world but traces, in literary form, how a world becomes, and, by repeating the creative forces of becoming, showing how the world became what it is, it holds out the potential that this world can become something new. By restricting their view of political action to historical struggles over the constitution of the nation-state, the editors of n+1, like Casanova, obscure the possibility that for those involved in such struggle the question of what that state might become, whose voices might be heard and whose lives valued as full citizens remains open. Literature is not simply a reflection of a state of affairs, but an actor, among many others, that participates in the assemblage and reassemblage of the collective. It is not, then, the degree to which a novel is derived from a local or national context that makes it political, but the extent to which its readers can find in it an ally in their co-creative construction of a world and its ongoing contestation. This is to argue against Adam Kirsch’s The Global Novel, which, although offering a spirited riposte to the n+1 editors, nonetheless contends that ‘writing the global novel means making a basic affirmation of the power of literature to represent the world’ (2016: 13). To represent, reflect and mirror a more primary reality is to exert little ‘power’ at all: it is a reactive, exhausted force, to recall Deleuze. If the global novel is to embrace ‘the capacity of fiction to reveal humanity to itself ’ (Kirsch 2016: 26) as an affirmation of its power, then its task is to create new definitions of human belonging, of cohabitation and of identification that may even escape the ressentiment of the present. This is precisely where Glissant located the work of postcolonial poetics. For him, the Caribbean writer’s task consists of ‘building a nation’, of ‘assembl[ing] a common will, by which we might be forged’ (Glissant 2010: 171) and of deploying a language that is ‘not codified,

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since it will result from the effort of the collective body that we aren’t yet’ (179). This ‘yet-to-come’ dimension is the political work of postcolonial literatures as much as it is of minor literatures: ‘literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people who are missing’ (Deleuze 1997: 4). I will return to this idea later in this chapter, where Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical will be discussed alongside Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, but for the moment it will suffice to note that it is simply not enough to criticize world or postcolonial literatures for their failure to evoke nationalist struggle, or to dismiss the work of minor literature because it is addressed to a revolutionary future, as if political action never looked beyond the present. Both the majoritarian nation-state and minor-becomings are implicated in Deleuzian philosophy: major and minor, actual and virtual, territories and their deterritorialization. Mobilizing both is the space and work of hybridity. As Glissant argues, the creole and the hybrid must be understood as the production of ‘a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open’ (1997: 34). The global, in the n+1 editors’ sense, is not rejected in favour of the local, but both perspectives are necessary for the creation of a new, postcolonial subjectivity. Or, to return to the project of world literature theorists, it is, in the words of world-systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘the task of utopistics’ (2000: 470). By this claim, Wallerstein calls for social transformation as a radical break with the existing capitalist world-system and, in doing so, echoes the anticipatory postcolonial yet-to-come suggested in Memmi’s call for the ‘complete disappearance of colonization – including the period of revolt’ (2003: 185), or Fanon’s anticipation of a ‘new humanity’ based on ‘a fundamentally different set of relations between men’ (2001: 198) and for which ‘we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’ (255). The ‘task of utopistics’ is not simply resistance to the present, but the creation of the radically new that exceeds the already known: when ‘we design our utopias in terms of what we know […] [w]e act in the end, and at best, as prisoners of our present reality who permit ourselves to daydream’ (Wallerstein 2000: 285). World literary scholars who look to Wallerstein and world-systems theory as the basis for approaching the text as a map which registers the contours of the world-system will find themselves charged with the task of not only tracing ‘the contradictions, the ambiguities, the complexities of the socio-political realities of this particular system’ (272), of examining and reclassifying our inherited critical assumptions and categories, of mediating between the ‘ideological battleground […] of the opposing interests within this historical system’ (272), but above all with the dissident undertaking of the creation of a world ‘utopistics’

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and a cosmopolitan people yet-to-come. When faced with universals which serve, ‘on the one hand as a palliative and a deception and on the other as a political counterweight which the weak can use and do use against the strong’ (276) – or in literary terms, which serve as both a rhetoric of innocence and an aesthetics of dissent – the intellectual, to repurpose Spivak, ‘has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish’ (1988: 308). Without prescribing in advance what an actor, in this case literature, is capable of, we must cede that yes, literature can become an instrument of consent, but not necessarily so, and by the same token it can also become one of dissent, but not necessarily so. Both are possible for any work of literature as texts enter into a relation with their readers. They create figurations of a world, perhaps one in which characters conform or preach their own rhetoric of innocence, or, alternatively, one in which such claims are ironized. In either case it becomes a question of how we read: do we find in a work of literature the comfort that allows us to ignore the Weberian violence that underpins our existence, or does it inspire us to challenge and change it? Glissant is an important voice to encounter at this point because his writings allow this and subsequent chapters to connect the relational, constructivist ontology of Bruno Latour with allied philosophers of dissent, such as Gilles Deleuze and, later, Jacques Rancière. With Bruno Latour and his Nietzschean ontology of active and reactive forces, as we saw in Chapter Two, the sociology of world literature takes the form of an aesthetics of relation: a ceaseless process of translation and creation by which a world is assembled by actors, both human and non-human. The world, in this account, is understood as a non-totalizable assemblage through which relations of dominance or inequality can emerge but never as the a priori structures or teleological ends to which all actors are fated. A literary text, in turn, can be understood as one site in which such a gathering is made possible – the gathering, that is, of voices, events and sensations which have the capacity to affect and which, together, constitute the social (in Latour’s terms). There is an intentional evocation of Glissant in this formulation of a world literary assemblage. For Glissant, ‘Relation’ is the ground of his ontology: an active, evolving and unfinished totality within which identities, cultures, technologies and imaginaries are formed. This totality is ‘not totalitarian […] not imposed a priori, not fixed as an absolute’ (Glissant 1997: 134), but rather a condition of relay and linkage in which identities emerge without recourse to concepts of pure origins, legitimacy, territorial belonging and direct lines of filiation. Fixed notions of identity, for Glissant, attempt to arrest the process of

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becoming within Relation as being and, thus, mistake constructed and provisional ‘unities’ as absolute ‘models’ (93). As with Latour and Deleuze, a philosopher who profoundly influenced his thought, Glissant privileges an immanent ontology in which the notion of separate spheres (literature and politics) is rejected. Rather, he maintains that thought, whether analytic or creative, is poorly conceived when considered an activity of ‘withdrawing into a dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone persists’; ‘thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. It informs the imaginary of peoples, their varied poetics, which it then transforms, meaning, in them its risks become realized’ (1). We might see this as a rejection of the autonomous literary space evoked by Casanova’s world republic, in which abstraction towards a pure aesthetic sphere detached from the political world is the assumed aim of literature. For Glissant, Relation is a universal condition that resists the notion of separate literary, political or cultural fields and instead functions as process of interaction. At the same time, he recognizes an element of otherness or opacity within any constructed and incomplete unity. Specifically, Glissant further argues for ‘the right to opacity’ rather than, simply, ‘the right to difference’ (190), since the latter implies an evaluation, a judgement by which difference emerges as a measure of deviance from a norm: ‘without creating a hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh. But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale’ (190). This reframing of postcolonial thought as a measure of difference beyond judgement and scale is a distinctly Deleuzian, and indeed, as it was for Deleuze, Nietzschean, move. To judge ‘presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values), criteria that preexist for all time’ (Deleuze 1997: 134): in other words, it depends on a priori values against which what is being judged can be measured, and it is therefore the expression of a reactive state of affairs or of ressentiment. It follows that to judge is to prevent ‘the emergence of any new mode of existence. For the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces it is able to harness […]. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge’ (135). Deleuze and Glissant share the conviction that it is not quite enough to simply assert postcolonial or any other form of difference if the aim is to escape a condition of ressentiment, of domination by external or opposed forces. Rather, the way to escape judgement, in Deleuzian terms, is to deterritorialize the self, to becomeother, ‘to make yourself a body without organs’ (131). While it is impossible for any actual form of life to fully deterritorialize, to become a body without organs in actuality, this comment suggests something of the role that the virtual

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(the zone towards which deterritorializations proceed and which is engaged in becoming) plays in Deleuze’s thought, particularly with respect to active rather than reactive forces. Glissant’s own concept of opacity usefully maintains a sense of transition between a knowable, graspable form of identity and that which escapes comprehension: I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him. It is not necessary to try to become the other (to become other) nor to ‘make’ him in my image. (Glissant 1997: 193)

For Glissant, it is ‘not necessary to try to become other’ precisely because of the immanence of the actual and the virtual – ‘We “know” that the Other is within us’ (27). As I have argued elsewhere (Burns 2012), Glissant and Deleuze share much in their assertion of a relational, open and incomplete totality that is at once actual and virtual, and as such it is always both the potential for the production of hierarchies which restrict life and the possibility that those forms of oppression can be overcome in the ongoing assemblage of the world. Crucially, then, Glissant’s concept of opacity assumes a world understood both as an actuality and as ungraspable excess: a totality that is always more than the sum of its parts and constantly changing. Relation, in turn, is the movement imagined by a constructivist philosophy, like that of Deleuze or Latour, which accounts for the emergence of new identities, cultures or social formations as fragile and incomplete assemblages or unities. Literature is privileged in Glissant’s theoretical writings as the site in which opacity or what Homi Bhabha would term hybridity emerges: ‘The literary text plays the contradictory role of a producer of opacity’ (Glissant 1997: 115), for Glissant, insofar as the implicit pact between writer and reader (mistakenly) assumes the transparent and unequivocal conveyance of meaning; or, in Bhabha’s words, ‘the pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement’ (Bhabha 1994: 36) and meaning becomes hybridized as it passes through ‘the Third Space of enunciation’ (37). Indeed, both Bhabha and Glissant find value in postcolonial hybridity, creolization or opacity insofar as they reveal the insufficiency of ‘hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or “purity” of cultures’ (37): identities, cultures and nations ‘have no primordial unity or fixity’ and as such they ‘can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew’

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(37). This present chapter takes forward a concept of relation gleaned from the constructivist and immanent philosophies of Latour, Deleuze and Glissant, but it does so with the aim not merely of exploring the translations or appropriations by which fixed forms of identity are rendered ‘untenable’ (Bhabha 1994: 37) by hybrid, creolized or opaque alternatives. Rather, it is with Glissant’s notion of opacity as an ungraspable or unrepresentable excess that this chapter identifies resistance or dissent as a form of becoming by which new and active states of affairs are created. To do so, I take his gesture towards solidarity in a decidedly Deleuzian direction. Beginning with what Glissant and Latour promote as a process of relation in which actors, identities and even worlds are constructed without a priori conditions, this chapter focuses on the political significance of an immanent ontology: finding in relation not merely solidarity between allied actors, but, in line with the Latourian/Nietzschean ideas explored in Chapter Two, the active co-creation of new forms of alliance or hitherto unimagined identities. In turn, the literary text can be understood not only as an actor reassembling the social or world network, but, to the extent that it operates as an active force, also as a site of creativity and of dissent. As such, it is a properly postcolonial resistance, engaged in the (literary) work of imagining a people no longer determined by an imperialist framework, a new humanity and people yet-to-come. This project is a utopistics as Wallerstein claims, but not in the sense argued by Nicholas Brown, who distinguishes between a positive utopia which ‘can only rearticulate the actual in futuristic form’ (2005: 22–3) and a negative utopia, understood as ‘nothing other than a lack or a contradiction in the actually existing social totality whose presence hints at an as yet unimaginable future. The future […] cannot be represented except as a lack’ (22). The yet-to-come evoked in my approach to postcoloniality, rather, follows Nietzsche’s (and later Deleuze’s) philosophy of resistance in which the potentiality of a future freed from ressentiment is realized in an affirmative act of creation or reconfiguration of a state of affairs and is not represented as such. To characterize resistance, utopian or otherwise, as premised on a lack obscures the dualism of this relational and immanent ontology. Here I have in mind the distinction drawn by Howard Caygill between active and reactive forms of resistance. Applying Nietzsche’s delineation of noble morality and ressentiment in The Genealogy of Morals, Caygill interrogates Marxist thought, for example, by asking ‘what is the genealogy of the Commune, was it noble or was it born of ressentiment?’ (2015: 36). His answer takes him towards a specifically Nietzschean understanding of

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the world as the relation of forces, active and reactive: ‘One of Marx’s voices is certainly the voice of vengeance; it is […] the voice that closes The Civil War in France prophesying the vengeance of history on the “exterminators” of the Paris Commune’ (37). However, ‘there is another voice in Marx’s Address which is much stronger, and of unquestionable nobility. It is the voice of the coming new world, the International Working Men’s Association’ (37) and therefore ‘in the face of repression and vengeance, the resistance of the Commune to Empire takes on a noble and affirmative character, creating a new democratic world beyond resisting the old’ (38). What might begin as a reactive stance, born of negation and determined by a reaction against another, can, Caygill argues, become the grounds for the active creation of a new social configuration that no longer defines itself in opposition to the old. The noble, active force is decidedly engaged in the act of creation, a leap beyond what is already known and possible; however, just as the unpredictable, disassembling force of Dionysus always appears to us through the voice of Apollo, the active force emerges via a reactionary position of ressentiment. ‘There is’, Caygill argues, ‘never a pure noble morality free of ressentiment, nobility consists not in innocent creation but in overcoming a predicament of ressentiment. In Marx’s scenario, the proletariat in its struggle against Empire finds affirmation in the struggle for a new political form. By resisting Empire, the proletariat defies an already reactive and poisonously vengeful political logic of repression’ (39). I find in this comment an echo of Derek Walcott’s claim for the new world poet. The condition of ressentiment that they face is one in which the weight of the colonial past overdetermines the possibilities of artistic invention – the petrifying medusa of history. Yet for Walcott, the poet is rather like Adam, free to create anew but not freed from context entirely; Adam carries with him the ‘original sin’ of history (Walcott interviewed in Handley 2005: 133). Postcolonial creativity, then, is as Caygill suggests not ‘innocent’; there is ‘never a pure noble morality free of ressentiment’, but nor is it limited by the ‘vengeful [colonial] logic of repression’; or as Walcott argued, a ‘literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters’ (Walcott 1998: 37). Resistance as revenge within this Nietzschean model cannot escape the position of ressentiment; however, a properly postcolonial glossing of resistance holds that it can be born of that confrontation when revenge turns into the creative expression of a new social and political form. For this reason, I argue, a sociology of literature understood as a reassembly of forces with the potential to reimagine the world anew will, by

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definition, retain the possibility for resistance and dissent even if it speaks to us now from a position of ressentiment. For Caygill, Frantz Fanon’s work can be read against the grain as a defence of affirmative and active forms of resistance in the specific sense proposed by Nietzsche. The colony is undoubtedly a state of ressentiment and alienation, but so too is the inevitable violence it inspires in the colonized, that is until it can be transformed into a creative impetus that reconstructs a world no longer compartmentalized and divided – ‘the invention of a life no longer shaped by responding to the initiatives of oppression and enemy’ (Caygill 2015: 104). As argued in Chapter One, Fanon’s characterization of the postcolonial intellectual and artist as engaged in the task of reimagining the nation constitutes part of this affirmative resistance, understood as the invention of something new. That resistance comes to signify the work of an active force of invention and reassembly does not foreclose the possibility that out of those actions will emerge an oppressive state of affairs; we cannot prescribe in advance, Latour insists, what a force will be. This is not only a sign of Latour’s resistance to transcendent or a priori causality within his philosophy, but a fundamental dualism: we cannot say what a force will be in advance because it is always the potential to be varying degrees of active and reactive forces, the two sides of reality in an unequal and shifting balance. Albert Camus’s reflections on artistic production in ‘Create Dangerously’ come to a similar conclusion, arguing that ‘art is neither complete rejection nor complete acceptance of what is. It is simultaneously rejection and acceptance, and this is why it must be a perpetually renewed wrenching apart’ (1995: 264). Between everyday reality and its total dissolution, art both represents and refigures the world, and in doing so performs the capacity for dissent available to all. In drawing attention to the legacy of Nietzsche within a philosophical history of defiance, Caygill’s work rereads Marxist thought, as well as that of the Frankfurt School and Fanon (among many others), in order to uncover an affirmative model of resistance and suggest alternative strategies for dissenting actors in an era of globalization: ‘Listening to and speaking with other resistances’ (2015: 186), or what Latour would call the work of translation; depersonalizing resistance and decoupling it from strictly ideological aims; and inventing ‘new forms of solidarity and subjectivity – the formation of new capacities to resist – through attempts to escape oppositional logics and the trap of escalation on the enemy’s terms’ (99). It is this last point that I want to take up and explore in the following section through the work of Arundhati Roy, in particular her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which I read as the performance of a mode of

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resistance that imagines new solidarities and transcends oppositional and fixed forms of identity politics. In approximating a postcolonial form of resistance understood as an active, creative form of relation, Roy’s most recent novel, it will be suggested, can be viewed as a response to the call of Rita Felski, who has argued that ‘what is needed […] is a politics of relation rather than negation, or mediation rather than co-option, of alliance and assembly rather than alienated critique’ (2015: 147). This, as will become clear through my reading of Roy, is an unending process of relation and mediation: even where new and potentially progressive solidarities are formed these should be considered fleeting, partial configurations: in Glissant’s terms, échos-monde (1997: 92–3) – constructed and temporary unities that form within Relation but which remain open to change and reconstruction. This is where the relational and constructive philosophy of Latour meets the dissident imperative of postcolonial literatures advocated throughout this book: literature as the assembly of a world that participates in ‘a politics of relation rather than negation’. In their different ways, Glissant, Latour and Deleuze all contribute to this understanding of the unfolding of relation as a process of alliance without a priori conditions, of assembly without dialectical negation, and of creation without teleological ends. This chapter has begun by glossing theories of relation and resistance through the work of Latour, Glissant and Deleuze; the remainder will focus primarily on two literary texts – Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg. These two writers are brought together as postcolonial novelists often considered to be at opposing ends of the aesthetics/politics divide: Roy the writer-activist whose most recent work has been judged, by some, to privilege proselyting political sentiment over artistic skill; Coetzee the author whose allegories allegedly displace the political force of postcolonial writing.2 By exploring these two writers, this chapter aims to bring into focus the stakes of world literature understood as a sociological assemblage that cannot be classified in advance as mirroring a more fundamental reality or system. Literature is never, to play on the analysis of Moretti in Chapter One, merely an instrument of consent. Rather, as an element within an ongoing process of relation every text is an actor with the potential to affect the creation of consent or dissent. What is new to this chapter, however, is the philosophical nuances of that dissident potentiality: a distinction that returns us to the noted concepts of becoming, deterritorialization and the virtual in Glissant’s opacity and which, through the work of Coetzee in the latter part of this chapter, will lead us towards a fuller account of the philosophy of Deleuze as a necessary supplement to that of Latour.

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Telling the story of everything: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Arundhati Roy’s status as a political activist has undoubtedly coloured reactions to her highly anticipated second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Published in 2017, twenty years after the Booker Prize winning The God of Small Things, The Ministry draws inspiration from the political conflicts, environmental tragedies and social injustices that Roy documented during that twenty-year period through her non-fiction, in works such as The End of Imagination, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Power Politics, Listening to Grasshoppers, Walking with the Comrades and Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Indira Gandhi’s suspension of civil rights during the Emergency of 1975–7, the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster of 1984, the struggle for Kashmiri independence, caste discrimination, the precarity of Indian women and the hijra community, the rise of Hindu nationalism and the 2002 Gujarat riots all register in the novel’s portrait of a modernizing India alongside Roy’s thinly veiled critique of its political leaders: the ‘Poet-Prime Minister’, Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1996, 1998– 2004), who ‘believed India was essentially a Hindu nation’ and whose ‘supporters and ideologues openly admired Hitler and compared the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany’ (Roy 2017: 41); ‘the Trapped Rabbit’ (81), Manmohan Singh (2001–14), a ‘timid, blue-turbaned Sikh economist’; and ‘Gujarat ka Lalla’, Narendra Modi (2014–present), former chief minister of Gujarat and current prime minister – ‘Some people believed he ought to be held responsible for mass murder, but his voters called him Gujarat ka Lalla. Gujarat’s Beloved’ (63). Reviewers have not missed the opportunity to draw attention to the novel’s political dimension, calling The Ministry ‘a passionately political masterpiece’ (Sawhney 2017: n.p.), ‘a polyphonic protest’ (Felicelli 2017: n.p.), and a work underpinned by the novelist’s ‘history of political and social activism’ (Hopley 2017: n.p.). Yet its status as a political novel has also garnered criticism, insofar as the vast political landscape and diverse range of actors have been regarded as responsible for the production of a fragmented, sprawling narrative with little sense of resolution. For Claire Messud, writing for the Financial Times, Roy’s ‘characters embody political concerns rather than […] those issues [that] arise organically out of human nature’ (2017: n.p.). For Parul Sehgal, the novel ‘isn’t concerned with the conventional task (or power) of fiction to evoke the texture and drama of consciousness. Instead, it acts like a companion piece to Roy’s political writings’ (2017: n.p.). While Allan Massie of The Scotsman is altogether

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exasperated by a novel without ‘any compelling story or narrative line’, and condemns Roy as ‘a tireless explainer, and like many tireless explainers, tiresome’ (2017: n.p.). Behind such value judgements is a profound sense of ‘good’ literature as the exploration of interiority and of the individual. The political novel, as such, will not offer the reader ‘a profound psychological understanding of its characters’, but rather ‘a powerful sense of their world, of the complexity, energy and diversity of [in this case] contemporary India’ (Messud 2017: n.p.). Yet, for Roy, writing fiction is ‘the opposite of an argument. It’s like creating a universe […] creat[ing] a world in which you want people to wander’ (Roy cited in Goodman and Shaikh 2017: n.p.); ‘Fiction is a world view, it’s not a manifesto’ (Roy cited in Sinclair 2017: n.p.). To this extent, Roy certainly does not seem like a ‘tireless explainer’, proselytizing readers to her cause. Massie’s criticism, however, may be taken as a commentary on the scale of the novel as well as on the range of historical contexts at work. Creating a universe, even a world, is, as any Latourian scholar of actor-network theory could confirm, a detailed affair. Roy constructs a network of multiple perspectives in order to consider the workings of power and resistance but not in order to present ‘a manifesto’, a fixed ideological prescription and means of correcting a world divided and unjust. Such a move would, for Roy, signal the reduction of the diversity of actors and world views to a single credo: ‘There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing’ (Roy 2003: 46). This does not necessarily mean that Roy refuses to ‘take sides’ under any circumstance; in her political writings she has noted that while writing about ‘very contentious issues, I take sides. I take a position. I have a point of view’ (Roy 2001: 11). There is a distinction to be drawn, then, not simply between aesthetics and politics, both of which can be a mediation within a network of world views and ways of being, but between the articulation of fixed and absolutist judgements upon a world beyond the text, on the one hand, and on the other, the creation, through the work of literature, of a world constituted by diverse and competing ways of seeing (what Latour would refer to as translations). Taking a side, when considered via Latour’s philosophy, is a choice to ally oneself with particular actors, extending the network and encouraging others to ally themselves to it. As noted in Chapter Two, this is where Latour’s philosophy reveals the workings of imperialism to a certain extent: all actors attempt to persuade others to share and reproduce their world view; that is precisely how powerful networks persist. Latour’s relational ontology is not one devoid of hierarchy or power. What he does refuse, however, is the fixed structures and teleological ideologies that are

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mistaken for the causes of one actor’s predominance or one network’s efficacy. By this measure, Latour and Roy are in agreement: there can be no single story, cause or explanation that lies behind a certain state of affairs, but rather ways of seeing or translations as the registered effects of actors at work in the world and, as such, in the creation of the world. Power is the predominance of one way of seeing over others, the extent to which other actors choose to ally themselves with it. Art and literature, then, are not simply the trace of the structural causes that explain a particular power dynamic, but an account of a choice made, an alliance forged and the ongoing reassembly of the social or world. Thus, for Roy, while artists and writers cannot be ‘charged with an immutable charter of duties and responsibilities’ (2001: 4. Emphasis added) – the text must reflect the capitalist world-system, or it must unconsciously betray repressed desires, for example – there is, nonetheless, ‘an intricate web of morality, rigor, and responsibility that art, that writing itself, imposes on a writer’ (5). No artist can move wholly beyond the world and ascend into Casanova’s abstracted world literary republic (or empire) of letters, detached from political concerns and material circumstance, but nor are they by definition fated to mirror them. The multiplicity of perspectives offered in The Ministry of Upmost Happiness is, as Decca Aitkenhead (2017) suggests, an intentional literary expression of solidarity with the victims of India’s modernization. This is not to say that she is ‘the voice of the voiceless’, since for Roy, ‘there’s no voiceless, there’s only the deliberately silenced, […] or the purposely unheard’ (Roy cited in Aikenhead 2017: n.p.), a profoundly Latourian and, indeed, Spivakian sentiment. It is a political act, a moral choice, to create a world in which the ‘purposely unheard’ are put front and centre, but not, however, a programmatic one, nor one that can reach an easy conclusion. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is structured by two dominant narrative strands: those of Anjum, a hermaphrodite who takes up residence within a Hijra community in Old Delhi, and S. Tilottama, a character who, as critics have noted, bears a notable resemblance to Roy herself: both were born to a Syrian–Christian family and brought up in Kerala, both studied architecture at university and both are politicized through an exposure to the victims of state oppression, most notably the conflict in Kashmir. Through Tilo we are presented with an archive of stories, press clippings and diary entries in the form of her lover Musa’s notebook, all of which recount various tales of murder, torture and violence committed, predominantly, by the Indian state, although Roy is careful to document instances of aggression on the

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part of Kashmiri militants too. Between Tilo’s experiences in Kashmir and her exposure to the archive of stories contained within Musa’s notebook and Anjum’s witnessing of the Gujarat massacre of 2002 and the transformation of Delhi into ‘the world’s favourite new superpower’ (Roy 2017: 96), Roy’s novel retraces many of the political and social issues addressed in her nonfiction. The rise of Hindu nationalism, for example, is presented as a parallel to the fascism of Nazi Germany – ‘as the saffron tide of Hindu Nationalism rises in our country like the swastika once did in another’ (165) – and the attendant violence against Muslims under the tacit encouragement of political leaders is uncompromisingly denounced as ‘mass murder’ (63). The incendiary violence in Gujarat in February 2002, it is suggested, was sparked by reported accounts of sixty Hindu pilgrims burned alive on a train returning from a holy site in Ayodhya: ‘A senior cabinet minister […] said the burning definitely looked like the work of Pakistani terrorists. The police arrested hundreds of Muslims’ (44). And echoing the words of the ‘unofficial spokesperson’ of Gujarat’s then chief minister, Narendra Modi, the novel recounts how ‘Newton’s Army [were] deployed to deliver an Equal and Opposite Reaction. Thirty thousand saffron parakeets with steel talons and bloodied beaks, all squawking together’ (62). The modernization of India, described in Power Politics as a process equivalent to the loading of the people of India ‘onto two convoys of trucks (a huge big one and a tiny little one) that have set off resolutely in opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on its way to a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world. The other convoy just melts into the darkness and disappears’ (Roy 2001: 3), is addressed in a chapter titled ‘The Nativity’. Taking an aerial view of the capital, the ‘nativity’ is a parody of globalizing modernity: ‘this was to be the dawn of her resurrection. Her new political masters wanted to hide her knobby, varicose veins under imported fishnet stockings, cram her withered tits into saucy padded bras and jam her aching feet into pointed high-heel shoes. It was the summer Grandma became a whore’ (Roy 2017: 96); ‘Kmart was coming. Walmart and Starbucks were coming’ (97); Skyscrappers and steel factories sprang up where forests used to be, rivers were bottled and sold in supermarkets, fish were tinned, mountains mined and turned into shinning missiles. Massive dams lit up the cities like Christmas trees. Everyone was happy. Away from the lights and advertisements, villages were being emptied. Cities too. Millions of people were being moved, but nobody knew where to. (98)

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The nativity is reimagined through the language of corporate globalization, while fishnet stockings, high-heeled shoes and padded bras evoke a specifically westernized image of female, youthful glamour, into which old India, ‘Grandma’, is being coerced. Advertisements backed by English media conglomerates and US multinationals – Kmart, Walmart, Starbucks – displace the local marketplace, and while the wealthy elite can agree that ‘the food shops were bursting with food. The bookshops were bursting with books. The shoe shops were bursting with shoes’ (99), behind India’s economic miracle, ‘away from the lights and advertisements’, lies an accelerating level of inequality; or to adapt Roy’s metaphor, the big convoy headed for darkness gets bigger. Villages are emptied of their inhabitants in the process of building massive dams, natural resources exploited for their commercial value, and all the while ‘experts aired their expert opinions for a fee: Somebody has to pay the price for Progress, they said expertly’ (99). Roy is uncompromisingly direct in her critique of India’s so-called economic miracle and its acceleration of wealth inequality, destruction of natural resources and the displacement of ‘millions’ of the country’s poorest in order to make way for industry. In The Ministry’s portrait of a globalizing and unequal India, Roy moves from the large-scale destruction of vast ecosystems to the small-scale, for example, the individuals made homeless or sick by the processes of industrialization. The 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, which maimed thousands of people, the country’s programme of massive dam building, and signs of multinational corporations on the advertisements and products available on the streets, all gesture towards the global scale of change. Alongside these stories, however, sit those of individuals: the three homeless men, sleeping under ‘stainless steel sculptures – public art – sponsored by the Pamnani Group that was promoting cutting-edge artists who used stainless steel as a medium’ (256–7), who are killed by a truck; or the story told by Dr Azad Bhartiya, brother of ‘Jiten Y. Kumar, who had worked in a granite quarry and died at the age of thirty-five. He described how he had to break up his brother’s lungs with a crowbar on the funeral pyre to release his soul […]. He said his brother’s lungs glittered, because they were specked with silica’ (258). These are the stories of the ‘unheard’ to recall Roy’s claims above; those who pay the price for progress as labour laws and environmental protections are flaunted in the name of profit. Both the large-scale panoramas of industrial accidents and land-clearing and the individual stories which populate this novel reveal a globalized network of actors. To adopt a Latourian perspective, to an ANT, the story of Jiten Kumar’s lungs is no less complex or far reaching than that of the Bhopal disaster, which implicated both the Indian government

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and the US-based Union Carbide Corporation. The fragments of silica in his lungs as a result of granite mining betray a global network constituted by actors with the capacity to affect others. Similarly, the three homeless men are drawn into the network of corporate capitalism: the artworks they sleep under are part of an advertisement campaign to promote the uses of stainless steel. Roy’s point, then, that no actor is silent but only knowingly unheard, resonates with a key premise of actor-network theory: in short, that actors are registered only via their actions, and that all actors are capable of such action, even if their effects are not widely registered. This is Spivak’s point too when she claims that it is not simply the case that the subaltern cannot speak but that we cannot hear them. Both Roy and Spivak seek a medium through which the poor, marginalized and oppressed can be heard. Jiten Kumar, as an actor within the novel, has the capacity to affect just as the silica (a non-human actor) affected him. The atrophying of his lungs turns Kumar into a hybrid that blurs the boundary between the human and the non-human and connects him to a wider network of corporate capitalism. The latter might seek to ignore him, to ‘unhear’ his voice, but within the network of Roy’s novel his story resonates and has the power to affect: ‘How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated’ (258). The Ministry creates a world in which the ‘unheard’ can make their voices heard; their stories affect Tilo, Anjum, and the narrative voice, whose indignation is clearly allied to Roy’s own. However, it does so with a profound sense of the complexity of the global network: industrial processes, corporate interests, governmental power plays, environmental disasters, nationalist and religious ideologies all operate within and shape the narrative and its characters. The Ministry ends with a question, in the form of Tilo’s poem, that every Latourian actor-network theorist faces: How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything. (436)

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Reconstructing a shattered story is the work of critical and imaginative thinking: the anthropologist described by Latour whose monograph traces the detailed network of relations that constitute a society (cf. Latour 1993a: 7), the writer whose fictional universe reimagines the social anew, both are implicated in a process of reassembling fragments of a narrative into an original, temporary and incomplete whole. Roy’s recognition that in telling a shattered story, reconstituting those fragments into a new and fragile structure, it is not enough to do so ‘by becoming everybody’ but rather ‘by becoming everything’ overrides, what Latour calls, the modern distinction between human and non-human. The story itself follows this impetus and traces a world of actors from the smallest fragment of silica to the birds that drift ‘lazily back and forth across the Line of Control, just to mock the tiny clot of humans down below’ (Roy 2017: 328), to an electric fan, which ‘had human qualities – she was coy, moody and unpredictable. She had a name too, Usha’ (20), and to India’s political leaders and world historical events, such as the 9/11 attacks. Tilo’s poem replicates the fragmentation characteristic of Indian society as a whole as it is imagined in the work, and the novel itself is a response to the question posed, an attempt to tell a shattered story, that is the stories of the many lives broken, destroyed and restricted by the political violence, military conflict, economic disparities and environmental catastrophes alluded to throughout. That retelling, however, cannot be limited to the human alone. The novel’s opening scene describes the demise of Delhi’s population of vultures: they ‘died of diclofenac poisoning. Diclofenac, cow-aspirin, given to cattle […]. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture-bait’ (1). Their ghosts haunt the graveyard in which Anjum establishes the Jannat Guest House and lives alongside a growing number of marginalized or excluded characters from across Indian society, both human and animal. The vultures persist as a sign of the threat of modernization and the decimation of lives judged to be too old or archaic for the new economic order: the victims, that is, of the modern outlook which establishes a break in the temporal order, a before and after, that excludes non-modern cultures and peoples from the narrative of progress. Hybrid characters which overcome the supposedly opposed epistemological categories of human and non-human (the fan with ‘human qualities’), nature and science (lungs that become granite sculptures; vultures that die from chemicals designed to artificially stimulate optimum milking conditions in cows) trouble the modern and, as argued in Chapter Two, imperialist certainty of the secure

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regulation of distinct categories, such as civilization and barbarism, self and other, modern and non-modern. Upon such certainties the telos and temporal break of the modern, imperialist world view is founded, and Roy’s novel offers a postcolonial riposte as it draws attention to the production of hybrids. Moreover, it is as a response to globalization and the modern acceleration of the production of hybrids that the shattered story at the heart of the novel takes on a loose, fragmented style, incorporating a diverse array of stories within its singular vision. To be sure, critics have scorned the multiplicity of perspectives offered in the book and have questioned the extent to which it manages to reconcile the two dominant narrative strands of Anjum and Tilo into a coherent whole. However, that seems to me to be a reflection of how the novel conceives of the modern world itself. As Roy argues in Power Politics, it is a particular effect of globalization that any one perspective will struggle to grasp the whole, but it is the task of the writer to draw attention to that which is purposefully erased or unheard: What is happening to the world lies, at the moment, just outside the realm of common human understanding. It is the writers, the poets, the artists, the singers, the filmmakers who can make the connections, who can find ways of bringing it into the realm of common understanding. Who can translate cashflow charts and scintillating boardroom speeches into real stories about real people with real lives. (2001: 32)

Art, Roy suggests, takes on a particular role in the activity of translation, permitting access to an extended range of actors, incorporating a greater number of connections or points within the network, in such a way that it will, in turn, enter ‘the realm of common understanding’, or in other words, appeal to and attract a large number of people whose own translated world views will be shaped by it. This is not mere populism but a political act, since, for Roy, our globalized, incomprehensible, complex world demands ‘a new kind of art. An art which can make the impalpable palpable, make the intangible tangible, and the invisible visible. An art which can draw out the incorporeal adversary and make it real. Bring it to book’ (32). Art and literature, then, denote a process of mediation between the two sides of reality: the intangible and the tangible, the invisible and the visible, or, as we saw in Chapter Two’s discussion of The Birth of Tragedy, the Dionysian abyss and Apolline individuation. This distinction does not return us to what Latour identified as the modern work of purification, the Kantian separation of distinct and incommensurable ontological categories, but

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rather a process of translation between these two halves of a single reality and, to recall Latour, the hybrid actors that result. Roy’s pun, that art ‘can draw out the incorporeal adversary and […] [b]ring it to book’, underscores the stakes of this relational process and of her conception of a new art. The pun draws attention to what Roy sees as the opportunity for resistance within art, and, more pertinently, its politics: ‘Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of forcing accountability. The politics of slowing things down. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction. In the present circumstances, I’d say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent’ (33). While I maintain that the ‘politics of opposition’ sits ill with a properly considered philosophical definition of the postcolonial, evoking the reversed binary of anticolonial resistance (a necessary stage, but one eventually to be overcome in the realization of a postcolonial situation in which the whole framework of imperialism and its opposition is discarded), Roy’s claims for a ‘politics of joining hands across the world’ anticipates the solidarity that Decca Aitkenhead (2017) found in The Ministry, implying that the political action of literature lies in its facilitation of a network of allied people who are attentive to the marginalization, silencing and oppression of others. Art and literature, then, are revealed from this perspective as, first, encompassing the permeable boundary between the visible and invisible, the heard and the unheard, the Apolline and the Dionysian (the fundamental pairing upon which all other binary divisions – human and non-human, art and science, reality and representation – are mistakenly conceived of as absolute and pure categories). Second, art and literature, as the site in which these two sides interact and the invisible becomes visible (Dionysus speaks in the voice of Apollo), necessarily carry forward the potential for dissent, the potential dissolution of any fixed form and re-sounding of previously silenced voices. And third, art and literature express a political dimension not merely within this capacity for dissent, but in the processes of translation and relation by which they are constituted and that they in turn provoke: the literary text as the creation, reassembly or translation of a world of forces or actors is in turn translated by those who ally themselves to it and reassemble their world in its wake. Widening the scope, the text assembles a world of actors in relation, is one part in a world of actors in relation, and participates in the ongoing reassembly of that world of actors in relation. To return to Caygill’s study of philosophies of dissent mentioned above, this is precisely the affirmative model of resistance that Nietzsche, and others since, offers us and, I would add, which is central to postcolonial thinking. A politics of dissent that overcomes the reactive struggle of opposed forces, which resists

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the urge to judge the world and to correct it, for Caygill (2015) this is precisely the affirmative form of dissent that we gain from Nietzsche and which, in an era of globalization, can renew the possibilities for defiance. Resistance becomes, by Caygill’s account, the act of listening and speaking to other forms of resistance across the world (or, as Roy argues, globalizing dissent); of depersonalizing dissent by disassociating it from strict ideological doctrines (or to paraphrase Roy, to take sides without pursuing a manifesto); and, finally, of inventing ‘new forms of solidarity and subjectivity – the formation of new capacities to resist – through attempts to escape oppositional logics and the trap of escalation on the enemy’s terms’ (Caygill 2015: 99) (or what Roy refers to as ‘a politics of holding hands’, of forging alliances and connections). These aspects of dissent are, Roy has shown, at work in art and in literature by means of their relational and dualistic ontology. The associated political demand of inventing ‘new forms of solidarity and subjectivity’ as the creative work of an active force is, in turn, evident in The Ministry of Upmost Happiness as the novel extends its exploration of a world of hybrid characters that transgress the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the real and the artificial, by imagining the possibilities of new forms of community. The Ministry is a novel concerned, Roy has claimed, with borders and border crossings: Anjum has ‘the incendiary border of gender running though her’, ‘Saddam has this border of caste and religious conversion – incendiary India – running through him’, Tilo ‘is also a person of indeterminate origins as far as India is concerned’, and Musa fights ‘with the national border running through him’ (Roy cited in Goodman and Shaikh 2017: n.p.). In the case of Anjum, who was named Aftab at birth and proclaimed a boy by the midwife, negotiating the fault-line of gender which runs through her lies at the heart of the novel’s attempt to refigure anew dissident forms of subjectivity, solidarity and community in the face of polarizing ideologies of nationalism, globalization and modernity. Indeed, Anjum’s mother, Jahanara Begum, struggles to make sense of her baby after she discovered ‘nestl[ed] underneath his boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part’ (Roy 2017: 7): She fell through a crack between the world she knew and worlds she did not know existed. There, in the abyss, spinning through the darkness, everything she had been sure of until then, every single thing, from the smallest to the biggest, ceased to make sense to her. In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things – carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments – had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. (8)

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Anjum, in other words, disrupts and troubles those certain and fixed worldviews in which every person and every thing assumes its assigned place. In particular, language is identified as the predominant way by which individuals construct their world and which enforces an order onto that world by signifying each thing’s designated place and subjective constitution. To recall Latour, while every actor is free to translate the forces and other actors it encounters, not all translations are treated equally: some will be accepted and will then form part of the dominant narrative or network, to use Latour’s term, others will be dismissed, ignored or undermined. The latter are unknown in the sense that they are not widely shared, they exist in a network with fewer points of connection, that encompasses fewer actors, but they are no less real than any other translated construction of the world. Thus, as Anjum’s mother comes to realize, another world exists beyond the everyday, accepted and known world. By embodying both male and female and refusing to settle into either category, Anjum is, as she claims, ‘a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing’ (4). As a character, then, Anjum echoes the narrative itself: a shattered story of diverse and manifold parts which struggle to come together as a coherent whole. Gathering both the known and the unknown, ‘everything and nothing’, is a never-ending task, a persistent negotiation between certainty and an elusive, ungraspable uncertainty and, as such, while Anjum finds solidarity within the hijra community at the House of Dreams, it is like all échos-monde a temporary expression of unity: in Spivak’s sense, a strategic alliance that remains open to renegotiation (cf. Spivak 1985: 244). Wholeness is as elusive, the novel suggests, as peace between India and Pakistan: as Anjum’s fellow hijra, Nimmo, claims ‘for us […] The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down’ (23). If Anjum is a gathering, then it is a fragile, contested and shifting one that ‘will never settle down’. This refusal is both a riposte to the identitarian politics of nationalism, caste and religion which inspire many of the acts of violence and hate documented throughout the novel, and a source of Anjum’s alienation from her family and wider society: as her mother well knows in traditional society, ‘in Urdu’, ‘all things […] had a gender’ (8). Of course, in 2014, three years previous to the publication of The Ministry, the Indian legal system first recognized kinnar (transgender) as an official third gender, following similar legislation in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh as a means to categorize the hijra community.3 However, Roy’s novel is careful to emphasize that Anjum is ‘not, medically speaking, a Hijra – a female trapped in a male body – although for practical purposes that word could be used’ (16);  rather she troubles any

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attempt to settle and name subjectivity. Such is Jahanara’s fear upon her discovery of her baby’s male and female genitalia: ‘Was it possible to live outside of language? Naturally, this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl’ (8). This question is recognized by Anita Felicelli (2017) as a gesture towards the complicity of identity politics, understood in the sense of fixed forms of identification and subjectivity, with oppressive ideologies, especially nationalism, or, in the case of India, Hindu nationalism and the Kashmir conflict. As Felicelli writes in her review of Roy’s novel: ‘the refusal to be named is the impulse to exist outside of language, outside of polemic, outside of countries and nations. It’s an impulse toward freedom. […] And yet, as Roy recognizes, even the smallest steps towards liberating or naming oneself as a marginalized person are quickly repudiated by those who have the material power’ (Felicelli 2017: n.p.). Jahanara’s fear is posed as a question rather than an affirmation that Anjum has transcended language and the uncertainty of the proposition persists: how can one exist outside language when even that question must be articulated in words? Even if it came first to Jahanara as an ‘embryonic howl’, the novel still must translate her articulation of incomprehension into words. Existing beyond language may be, by some measure, as Felicelli notes, ‘an impulse toward freedom’, escaping the trappings of fixed subjectivities such as gender, caste and race, and their attendant designations within the social hierarchy; however, it is an impossible state to attain: the abyss beyond language where individuality and self are undone is accessible only, Nietzsche reminds us, by Dionysus in his pure state, for even Dionysus can speak to us only, ultimately, through the voice of Apollo (form).4 The Ministry thus points towards a resistant subjectivity as the dissolution of the individual (Anjum is a gathering of ‘everybody and nobody’ [4]), and with it the fixed subjective categories of gender, nation and caste, while revealing the ways in which those very things are created and perpetuated in a world dominated by reactive forces. Rather than moving beyond language, characters like Anjum and Nimmo seek a new language that can incorporate a greater range of subjectivities and stories. Indeed, this was the task that Roy set herself as a novelist: ‘I’ll have to find a language to tell the story I want to tell. […] A way of binding together worlds that have been ripped apart’ (Roy cited in Kumar 2011: n.p.). Telling a shattered story, gathering the fragments of everybody and nobody, requires a new kind of language rather than no language at all. This challenge takes on an ethical imperative when viewed against the backdrop of the ethnic and religious violence, environmental degradation and

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growing wealth inequalities that lie behind the novel’s portrait of a modernizing India. The risk is that, within the powerful and dominant narrative of the nation and its history, the stories of minorities will be silenced and unheard: as Ustad Kulsoom Bi, one of Anjum’s fellow hijras, tells a group of tourists during a tour of the Red Fort, ‘that is us. That is our ancestry, our history, our story’; ‘What mattered was that it existed. To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it all together’ (Roy 2017: 51). Being written out of language, being afforded no place within language whatsoever, is a political expediency for those who would seek to control the narrative of the nation and to exclude those, like Anjum and the hijras, who do not conform to it. The Ministry is an attempt to gather and preserve the voices of those otherwise silenced and unheard. As Anju’s descriptor ‘mehfil’ – ‘I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing’ (4) – suggests, such ‘a gathering’ carries with it an allusion to art – a mehfil is a gathering in the sense of an audience gathered to listen to poetry, music or dance.5 Like language, however, art is associated both with the capacity for freedom and an oppressive, conservative function. Anjum’s father, Mulquat Ali, for example, has a profound love of poetry and can produce a couplet from his formidable repertoire that was eerily apt for every illness, every occasion, every mood and every delicate alteration in the political climate. This habit of his made life around him seem more profound and at the same time less distinctive than it really was. It infused everything with a subtle sense of stagnancy, a sense that everything that happened had happened before. That it had already been written, sung, commented upon and entered into history’s inventory. That nothing new was possible. (15–16)

Poetry, in this example, is characterized as a representation that is ‘more profound’ but ‘less distinctive’ than the reality to which it corresponds, precisely the definition of Apolline art in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy: the Apolline is no mere mirror of the real, but its perfected image.6 However, as in Nietzsche, Apolline art and poetry rely on established form and thus cannot account for what is new in the world; newness, rather, is a creative force associated with the active power of Dionysus. Mulquat’s poetry refigures experience as an aesthetic expression of what is already known, and thus for his hermaphrodite child, for whom the Urdu language can assign no gender, ‘Mulaqat Ali had no suitable couplet’ (16). The complicity of art and representation with fixed forms

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of knowledge takes a troubling turn in the novel’s portrayal of contemporary journalism and media, which are seen to turn acts of state violence or corporate negligence into spectacle. Journalists are disappointed to learn that Anjum holds no resentment against her mother and father, confounding their assumptions that she must have been subjected to abuse and cruelty, and so, in their reporting, ‘her story was slightly altered to suit readers’ appetites and expectations’ (26). A group of documentary filmmakers, who ‘were making a documentary film about Protest and Resistance’, attend a gathering of displaced farmers and ask the protesters to ‘say, “Another World is Possible” in whatever language they spoke’, however when they ‘asked Anjum to look straight into the lens when she spoke’ they do not understand her version; ‘They had no idea what “Duniya” meant in Anjum’s lexicon. Anjum, for her part, completely uncomprehending, started into the camera. “Hum doosri Duniya se aaye hain”, she explained helpfully, which meant: We’ve come from there … from the other world’ (110). Roy’s novel itself is not exempt from ‘taking sides’ when it comes the portrait offered of contemporary India, and so the issue here is not simply the act of appropriation implicit in the journalists’ stories or the filmmakers’ documentary. What is distinctive about the latter’s actions is their inability to account for that which challenges or exceeds their knowledge of the world: the journalists cannot conceive of a version of Anjum’s story that runs counter to their readership’s expectations; the documentary filmmakers, while proclaiming their conviction that ‘another world is possible’, struggle to translate their sense of ‘Duniya’ (‘world’ in Hindi) into ‘Anjum’s lexicon’. In other words, the filmmakers are identified with a form of resistance that seeks to challenge this world by posing the possibility of another world, presumably one in which the disparate group of protesters – displaced farmers, hijras, representatives of the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, ‘Manipuri Nationalists asking for the revocation of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which made it legal for the Indian Army to fire on “suspicion”; Tibetan refugees calling for a free Tibet; and, […] the Association of Mothers of the Disappeared, whose sons had gone missing, in their thousands, in the war for freedom in Kashmir’ (114) – would find some degree of justice. Of course, the diversity of positions and protests is a deliberate counterview to the simplicity of the filmmakers’ motif, ‘Another World is Possible’. The former constitutes the shattered story of which Roy’s novel is composed; the latter posits a singular, alternative world that is troubled by Anjum’s interpretation of their command – ‘We’ve come from there … from the other world’. For Anjum, another world already exists and it sits alongside the ‘Duniya’ countenanced by

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the filmmakers. They, like the journalists, struggle to account for that which challenges their understanding of the world and while they seek to incorporate the different languages of the protesters, they cannot accommodate radically different translations of ‘Duniya’ (world). The filmmakers reveal the moment at which dissent is decoupled from the creative act of reimagining the alliances and solidarities that can be forged in this world and as this world’s ongoing reassembly. Theirs is a reactive form of resistance, opposing one world order against another, rather than an active force which ‘attempts to escape oppositional logics and the trap of escalation on the enemy’s terms’ (Caygill 2015: 99). Connecting Anjum’s father, who has a couplet for every eventuality, except for the news that his son is a hermaphrodite, and the journalists and filmmakers, whose attempts at telling the story of lives shattered by poverty, violence and social marginalization are restricted by their inability to conceive of alternative narratives or translations of the world as they see it, is the search for a language that makes visible what the dominant narrative makes invisible, and heard what is silenced. As Musa’s young daughter, Miss Jebeen, often asks of him, ‘tell me a story. And then she would begin the story herself […] There wasn’t a witch, and she didn’t live in the jungle. Tell me a story, and can we cut the crap about the witch and the jungle. Can you tell me a real story?’ (Roy 2017: 316). This motif is echoed by Tilo herself, who asks Musa to ‘tell me the other story … the one that’s horrible and beautiful … the love story. Tell me the real story’ (366). Stories which conform to predetermined expectations – the child who expects a bedtime story to consist of fairy-tale characters and predictable plotlines, the readers who expect a newspaper story of a hijra to be a tale of abuse, the audience of a documentary film about resistance who expect platitudes which defer the possibilities of social justice and equality to another world – at best they are an Apolline idealism, at worst a Socratic expression of ressentiment.7 A story that can account for what is new, unpredictable and difficult to define will, of course, always reach the reader through ‘whatever language’ they understand, but, rather than resisting divergent interpretations, such a story will actively encourage this creative process. That story is more ‘real’ perhaps only in the Nietzschean sense that it accounts both for this actual world and ‘the other world’ in which Anjum and her fellow residents of the Jannat (Paradise) Guest House reside, a world that blurs the boundaries between human and non-human, male and female, life and death. Situated in a graveyard, Anjum’s refuge becomes a place for those who are excluded and overlooked, who do not exist: ‘This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqeeqat

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[reality]. Arre, even we aren’t real. We don’t really exist’ (84). The graveyard and Guest House, while offering the residents a place to find solace and solidarity in a new community of outcasts, redefining notions of gender, family and belonging against a context of Indian nationalism and religious violence, never settle (like Anjum herself) as a fixed, alternative reality. Rather, it too is riven by the border between reality and the ghostly other-world into which Musa has passed. The ‘real story’ that Miss Jebeen and Tilo demand is precisely the one that eschews the fairy tale and contrived plot; it is the shattered story of these ‘falling people’ who ‘don’t really exist’. This is the difference between a dominant reality in which each person, animal and object has an ascribed place and function, and another reality, to play on Anjum’s ‘another world’, that is both ordered and disordered, individuated form and unindividuated formlessness. As Nietzsche argued in The Birth of Tragedy, the latter more fully accounts for reality. Finally, it is because Roy’s shattered story encompasses both aspects of reality – the known and the unknown – that it opens up the potential for dissent understood as an active and unceasing creative force. New forms of solidarity and belonging may emerge and may even hold out the potential for progressive alliances between those overlooked by capitalist modernity, but not as settled, fixed and final forms of identification. Every consensus carries with it the potential for, in Deleuze’s terms, future deterritorializations lest it become a new hegemony.

On revolution and ressentiment: J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg As can be seen in critical responses following the publication of her long-awaited second novel, the work of Arundhati Roy is often viewed as a measure of the politics espoused in her non-fiction. She is descried, as a result, as either offering too loose or individualistic a portrait of social problems or, at the other extreme, for sacrificing the aesthetic value of her work to political aims. Indeed, to the editors of n+1, writing in 2013, it seemed as if Roy had ‘abandoned the novel, after The God of Small Things, because she couldn’t find a fictional form that was right for her developing radical politics’ (n+1 2013: n.p.). Where Roy is resistant to the globalization of literature and its attendant depoliticization, offering instead a fiercely political polemic directed against present-day manifestations of global injustice in her native India, J. M. Coetzee, they argue, dispassionately observes the violence of his South Africa: ‘Insurrectionary [Nadine] Gordimer has

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given way to the sedulously horrified Coetzee’ (n.p.). This is not an uncommon criticism of Coetzee, albeit one that this chapter vigorously resists. Coetzee’s mode of allegorical writing, for example, has been criticized for ‘lacking any understanding of the historical forces that produce actual imperial systems at particular phases of history; failing, above all, to have any understanding of capitalist economic processes leading to a capitalist imperialist civilization’ (Rich 1984: 385). For Benita Parry (1998), Coetzee repeats the failings of postcolonial theory in its poststructuralist guise by offering no position outside of colonial discourse by which an alternative strategy of resistance can be staged – or in other words, it imagines no strong dialectical movement from colonial to decolonial subjectivity.8 For Nadine Gordimer, Coetzee ‘does not recognize what the victims, seeing themselves as victims no longer, have done, are doing, and believe they must do for themselves’, and, as a result, The Life and Times of Michael K ends with an expression of ‘revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions’ (1984: n.p.). Coetzee’s Life and Times offers us ‘the idea of gardening’ (n.p.) and not a practical vision of the work of national rebuilding in the aftermath of apartheid. The final section of this chapter explores the political and dissident potential of Coetzee’s fiction through another novel, The Master of Petersburg, one which, for us, evokes both a postcolonial and world literary stage. This novel reimagines the life of the nineteenth-century Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Aspects of the novel are rooted in historical fact, while others are fictionalized – Dostoevsky did have a stepson from his first marriage called Pavel, but he outlived his stepfather. However, as Derek Attridge notes, ‘the protagonist of The Master of Petersburg is very close to the historical Dostoevsky; much closer than, for instance, Foe in the novel named after him is to the historical Daniel Defoe’ (2004: 117), detailing, for example, the writer’s epilepsy and gambling debts. In particular, Coetzee chooses to explore Dostoevsky’s life as he undertakes the writing of his novel Demons (also translated as The Possessed or The Devils), which he began in December 1869. The Master of Petersburg begins in October 1869 as Dostoevsky returns to St Petersburg from Dresden upon learning of the death of his stepson Pavel and follows his interactions with Pavel’s associates, most notably Sergei Nechaev, a rendering of Sergey Nechayev whom the real-life author fictionalized in Demons as Peter Verkhovensky. The Master of Petersburg was, as Attridge notes, Coetzee’s first novel to be published after the end of apartheid in South Africa and it is less obviously allegorically connected to the contemporary political situation, although Attridge stresses that, like all Coetzee’s early work, it too is addressed to questions of ‘otherness, oppression

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and resistance’ (2004: 116).9 Patrick Hayes (2010: 1) is right to observe the efforts made by Derek Attridge (2004) and David Attwell (1993) to reclaim Coetzee as an ethical writer and thus rescue him from the most forceful of Marxist critiques. That said, precisely how Coetzee imagines ‘otherness, oppression and resistance’ is central to this present evaluation of the work of postcolonial literary dissent as an active, relational force. The Master of Petersburg, for us, responds to the question posed by Casanova – what is the relation between literature and politics? – by focusing on the emotional state of the writer, as well as the sources of his inspiration, as he begins to draft what would become the suppressed chapter of Demons, ‘At Tikhon’s’.10 The novel at once asks what drives a writer and what is at stake in their representations of violence and degradation, and draws a parallel with revolutionary struggle through Dostoevsky’s interactions with Nechaev, who, like his historical counterpart, is the leader of a group of revolutionary terrorists opposed to Tsarist rule in Russia. The real-life Nechayev produced a manifesto in 1896, ‘Catechism of the Revolutionist’, in which he argued, as Margaret Scanlan observes, for ‘overthrowing the existing system’ by whatever means necessary, ‘however cruel and treacherous’ (2001: 96). An allusion to this pamphlet in Coetzee’s novel underscores the nihilism of Nechaev’s revolutionary struggle as it portrays the revolutionary as a man who ‘has cut all links with the civil order, with law and morality. He continues to exist in society only in order to destroy it’ (Coetzee 2004: 60–1). Yet pinning down what Nechaev is, what he stands for or even what to name his ideological position – anarchist, nihilist – is not so simple, and extended passages of the novel find Dostoevsky explaining to others why they misunderstand the shadowy Nechaev. In the final meeting between the two characters, Coetzee affords Nechaev a degree of sympathy by making clear the poverty that motivates his struggle. Addressing Dostoevsky, he tells him that all you see are the miserable material circumstances of this cellar, in which not even a rat or a cockroach should be condemned to live. You see the pathos of three starving children […]. You see how the poorest of our black poor of Petersburg have to live. But that is not seeing, that is only the detail! You fail to recognize the forces that determine the lives to which these people are condemned! Forces: that is what you are blind to! (180)

In a move which extends the relevance of this assertion far beyond Tsarist Russia, Nechaev clearly attributes the poverty and inequality that he witnesses to ‘the ministries and the exchequers and the stock exchanges and the merchant

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banks’ (180–1): to capitalism, in other words, and the institutions of state which support it. Poverty and hunger are symptoms, then, of these ‘real forces manifest […] in the world’ (181). For us, this is an echo of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry, revealing the world-making force of capitalism. As my analysis argued, through Latour and complimentary philosophers such as Deleuze, an immanent, relational philosophy of capitalism does not deny the influence of forces or the symptomologies that they create, but they do resist the characterization of them as an a priori ground or structural premise. To some extent, this is also revealed as Nechaev’s error. In this scene with Dostoevsky, we are told that the writer senses something missing in Nechaev’s argument, that he is ‘not sure what Nechaev means by lines’ (182). Ultimately, Nechaev’s revolutionary struggle is aimed at reproducing the utopian break that we saw in Chapter Two with Pauline Melville’s ‘Totallies’ (2009: 225), to recall Donny’s definition of those who saw history as the inevitable prelude to an anticipated new world order: ‘Revolution is the end of everything old […]. Year One. Carte blanche. When everything is reinvented, everything erased and reborn: law, morality, the family, everything. When all prisoners are set free, all crimes forgiven’ (Coetzee 2004: 189). In this radical future, ‘the people will tell you what you are allowed’ (185) to do, to wear, or to identify oneself as; ‘we will teach the people’s way of thinking […]. In our schools we will make new men and new women’ (189). Behind this lies a certain absolutism. It could be a radically democratic future, one in which, as Bhabha argued, the ‘grounds of opposition’ are no longer the structuralized confrontation ‘of master and slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist’ but rather ‘a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics’ (1994: 25). Where this diverges from the utopian thinkers discussed via Gray in Chapter Two is in Bhabha’s claim for ‘a dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History’ (25). From John Stuart Mill he adapts a form of politics based on negotiation rather than negation – the coming into relation of ‘oppositional and antagonistic elements’ (22) that are not ‘pre-given political subject[s]’ or ‘a priori reconstituted principles’ (23), but which are (re-)created in that space of translation as part of ‘a dialogical discursive exchange’ (23). For Bhabha, ‘dissensus, alterity and otherness are the discursive conditions for the circulation and recognition of a politicized subject and a public “truth”’ (23). In other words, politics and ‘truth’ stand as constructed, non-teleological, non-absolute moments of coherence

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or agreement that stem from the productive relation of forces that differ; which is to say that underlying every consensus is a dissensus as its ‘discursive condition’ and as the basis of an active form of resistance that cannot be directed by predetermined ends. Nechaev, on the other hand, begins with a structural premise – the ‘lines of force’ that trouble Dostoevsky – that requires an equally absolutist approach – the whole system must be destroyed. Thus, as Dostoevsky tells the police officer Maximov, ‘Nechaev stands first and foremost for the violent overthrow of all the institutions of society, in the name of a principle of equality – equal happiness for all, or, if not that, then equal misery for all’ (Coetzee 2004: 35–6), and there is nothing that he would not sacrifice in the pursuit of that principle, even, as was the case in the historical antecedent, the murder of a comrade. What troubles Dostoevsky is not opposition to the system per se, but, in Bhabha’s terms, the total separation of two parties in dispute and the absolute conviction that the one just truth will triumph over the other. Nechaev’s claim that ‘everything is permitted for the sake of the future’ (200) evokes an absolutism that chimes with suspicions regarding his possible involvement in the death of Pavel as well as that of the Finn, whom his associates have assisted towards suicide after being arrested. But it points too at another Dostoevskian intertext: not Devils, but his final novel The Brothers Karamazov. ‘The formula, “everything is permitted”’ (Dostoevsky 2004: 263), is spoken by Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov at the end of the chapter ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, in which we witness a conversation between Ivan and his younger brother, Alyosha, concerning a poem supposedly written by Ivan on the subjects of religion, freedom and the nature of mankind. Coetzee’s own gestures to The Brothers Karamazov have been observed by some critics (cf. Hayes 2010; Scanlan 2001): most notably, Pavel’s story read by Maximov and, later, by his stepfather, bears the trace of Dostoevsky’s last novel as it describes the murder of a landowner called ‘Karamzin or Karamzov’ (Coetzee 2004: 47) by its hero Sergei. The fragments of Pavel’s story tell of a vengeful convict, Sergei, who is affronted by a ‘landowner, who is portrayed as a gross sensualist, [who] tries to force his attentions on’ (40) a young peasant girl, Marfa. For Maximov, it is clear that this Sergei is Pavel’s alter-ego or, perhaps, Sergei Nechaev himself, since in the story the murder of the landowner is imagined as an act of retribution: ‘Sergei does not leave the murder weapon behind. No, he takes it with him. What for, asks Marfa? I quote his reply: “Because it is the weapon of the Russian people, our means of defence and our means of revenge”. The bloody axe, the people’s revenge – the allusion could not be clearer, could it?’ (41–2). In Dostoevsky’s

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hands, however, the ‘gross sensualist’ is Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, murdered by his illegitimate son and servant Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov.11 Both Pavels (Dostoevsky’s Smerdyakov as well as Coetzee’s fictionalized stepson) fall under the influence of those who preach a nihilistic philosophy in which ‘everything is permitted’. In The Brothers Karamazov, it is the middle brother, Ivan, who instils this sentiment in Smerdyakov – ‘Ivan does not have a God. He has his idea. […] I [Dimitri] said to him, “Then everything is permitted, in that case?”’ (Dostoevsky 2004: 593). In a godless world, everything is permitted, even the murder of one’s own father. Ivan begins to sketch out ‘his idea’ in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ chapter by first telling of the Virgin Mary’s intercession on behalf of all sinners: ‘The Mother of God visits hell and the Archangel Michael guides her through “the torments”. She sees sinners and their sufferings. […] And so the Mother of God, shocked and weeping, falls before the throne of God and asks pardon for everyone in hell, everyone she has seen there, without distinction […] the pardon of all without discrimination’ (247). For Ivan, this sparks his poetic account of the encounter between the Grand Inquisitor and Jesus, whom he has arrested for performing miracles. He will condemn Jesus as a heretic because the church is ‘not with you, but with him [Satan], that is our secret!’ (257). They have rejected their faith because of the freedom it gave to mankind: ‘You thirsted for love that is free, and not for the servile raptures of a slave before a power that has left him permanently terrified. But here, too, you overestimated mankind, for, of course, they are slaves, though they were created rebels’ (256); ‘We corrected your deed and based it on miracle, mystery, and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep, and that at last such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much suffering, had been taken from their hearts’ (257). Totalitarianism is the end of absolute freedom, according to Ivan, because of human necessity (‘You promised them heavenly bread, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, eternally depraved, and eternally ignoble human race?’ [253]), inequality (‘never, never will they be able to share among themselves’ [253]) and the desire for complete and unquestionable consensus (‘man seeks to bow down before that which is indisputable, so indisputable that all men at once would agree to the universal worship of it’ [254]). This is the risk too, Coetzee suggests, of revolutionary action. Nechaev echoes Ivan not only in his claim that ‘everything is permitted’ (Coetzee 2004: 200), but in using the Bible as justification for his violent actions: ‘On the day after the last day, […] the Mother of God will leave her throne in heaven and make a pilgrimage to hell to plead for the damned’ (201). Man, the rebel, by this account, knows that he will be forgiven any transgression and this

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will lead, as it does in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, to the surrender of freedom to an absolute ruler: to the church in The Brothers Karamazov – ‘We will allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children […] we will decide all things, and they will joyfully believe our decision’ (Dostoevsky 2004: 259) – or, in The Master of Petersburg, to the people – ‘The people will tell you what you are allowed’ (Coetzee 2004: 185). Coetzee’s novel exposes the slippage between totalitarianism and the nihilism of Ivan’s and Nechaev’s formula: as Dostoevsky tells Anna, the assertion ‘everything is permitted’ is not an ideology in itself and that ‘by giving him labels you miss what is unique about him. He does not act in the name of ideas. He acts when he feels action stirring in his body. He is a sensualist. […] He wants to live in a body at the limits of sensation, at the limits of bodily knowledge. That is why he can say everything is permitted’ (113–14). Nechaev’s uniqueness, his originality, is evident at the limit of experience; he is, in Deleuzian terms, an ‘original’, ‘a powerful, solitary Figure that exceeds any explicable form: it projects flamboyant traits of expression that mark the stubbornness of a thought without image, a question without response, an extreme and nonrational logic’ (Deleuze 1997: 82–3). Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical is an important consideration for the understanding of literary forms of dissent developed by this chapter. As we have seen through Caygill and Latour, the detachment of resistance from teleological ends or a priori structural premises leads us back to Nietzsche and the relation of forces, active or reactive. Resistance emerges between these two poles in this model: never an expression of ‘pure noble morality’ itself, forms of dissent display varying degrees of reactive ressentiment and active forces which constitute ‘a life no longer shaped by responding to the initiatives of oppression and enemy’ (Caygill 2015: 104). As we have seen, this designates a particular function to the work of a properly postcolonial literature aimed at overcoming the ressentiment of the colony, or in other words, imagining a life that no longer responds to ‘oppression and enemy’. Latour has taken us some way towards understanding literature’s activity in reassembling a world in which active forces can come to prominence over those that are reactive, and can do so as a means to reimagine bonds of community and reconstitute forms of identification. However, with the challenge posed by Coetzee’s Nechaev in mind we must now turn to another philosopher – Gilles Deleuze. Latour and Deleuze share a relational, constructivist philosophy which departs from Hegelian totality or the Cartesian a priori ego; both approach literature and the work of literary criticism as a creative act of translation, the production of a new assemblage rather than a process of digging down to uncover a hidden ‘truth’ or structure

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of reality. Where they diverge, perhaps, is in the role accorded by Deleuze to the virtual, although Latour also finds the need to introduce a complimentary term to account for the production of difference and the new – plasma.12 In Deleuze, the virtual plays a powerful role in the critical task dubbed by Wallerstein as ‘utopistics’ – the production of a future that is unpredictable and unforeseeable from our current position; a future in which we can slip our chains as prisoners of the present and create a radically new social assemblage.13 The world, by this account, is still a patchwork of forces, active and reactive; or, better, the impact of these forces as they make their presence felt in the world, since we can only register actors through their actions, or, in Deleuzian terms, as symptoms: ‘The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man’ (Deleuze 1997: 3). Deleuze can characterize literature as ‘an enterprise in health’ by means of his Nietzschean diagnosis of illness as a blockage, ‘not a process but a stopping of the process’ (3): health, in other words, is an open becoming, a ceaseless process of creation, and illness is the closure of that potentiality. To understand literature as health is to align it with the process of becoming inherent in all literature as its ‘minor’ aspect. As noted above, all literature is at once major and minor, the latter designating that which escapes generic classification, standardized language and predictable plot and forms. As such, it is the revolutionary capacity of all literature to become-new. With Essays Critical and Clinical, however, Deleuze expands on the relation between world and text imagined in the work of minor literature. ‘Literature’, Deleuze argues in his introduction, ‘moves in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete. […] Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable [sic] or lived experience. […] Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomesmolecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible’ (1). Writing and literature cannot, by definition, become an exercise in absolute formlessness, no matter how radical or experimental the work may be. By the same token, one never, in actuality, becomes a body without organs; nothing that we can encounter has ever become wholly imperceptible. Once again, we are thinking in terms of a scale, a matter of degrees between the two poles of fixed and fully determined being (a blocked, reactive state of affairs) and absolute deterritorialization or becoming (an entirely free and active state of affairs). Thus, Deleuze argues, the formula uttered by Herman Melville’s Bartleby, ‘I would prefer not to’ (Melville 1987: 20), can be observed via its effects on the world of his story as a deterritorialization which destroys rationality and understanding. Of course, in one sense it has a form, each work is perfectly comprehensible, but ‘the literality of the formula’

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(68), its function in the text, ‘moves in the direction of the ill-formed’ (1), a becoming the goes beyond lived experience, or to recall Coetzee’s Nechaev, an expression of bodily, sensual experience rather than ideology. I want to spend a little more time on Deleuze’s essay ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’ before returning to The Master of Petersburg, for it will give us a theoretical lens through which we can better view Coetzee’s particular form of literary resistance. Most significantly, it will return us to Nechaev’s uniqueness or originality, as well as his function in the text as an agent of dissent. Bartleby’s formula is an expression of minor literature as Deleuze and Guattari define it, since it ‘carves out a kind of foreign language within language’ (Deleuze 1997: 71).14 It is not merely that it poses a challenge to ‘making sense’ or understanding, but, rather, Bartleby’s utterance, ‘I would prefer not to’, ‘not only abolishes the term it refers to, and that it rejects, but also abolishes the other term it seemed to preserve’ (71) – in other words, it is never clear what Bartleby’s preferred task would be, what alternative he is countenancing or even on what grounds he is refusing. In this way, ‘all particularity, all reference is abolished’ (71). He is not, as such, ‘a rebel or insurrectionary’ as he makes no specific objection; he takes no particular stance against anything. He challenges the established social order not by standing against a particular wrong or injustice, but by deterritorializing its assumptions. Other Melvillean characters achieve such effects by other means: Captain Ahab and Claggart are ‘monomaniacal demon[s]’ (79), ‘innately depraved beings [who] participate in a terrible supersensible Primary Nature, original and oceanic, which, knowing no Law, pursues its own irrational aim through them’ (79). But it is the task of the writer, who is not of Primary Nature, to witness their impact on the world: ‘Melville says that only the eye of a prophet, and not a psychologist, is capable of discerning or diagnosing such obscure beings’ (79); ‘The novelist has the eye of a prophet, not the gaze of a psychologist’ (82). Through Melville, Deleuze identifies two characters of Primary Nature – demons like Ahab and Claggart, and ‘saintly hypochondriacs’ (79) like Bartleby – and each has the function of deterritorializing the world of law and reason through their becomings (Ahab’s becoming-whale, Bartleby’s becoming-imperceptible). But it is the novelist who bears witness to and creates a diagnosis of what they reveal of the world: The role of prophets, who are not originals, is to be the only ones who can recognize the wake that originals leave in the world, and the unspeakable confusion and trouble they cause in it. The original, says Melville, is not subject to the influence of his milieu; on the contrary, he throws a livid white light on his surroundings. (83)

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The distinction between prophet and psychologist plays on this creative dimension: a psychologist is confronted with a set of conditions and labels them according to a known classification; a prophet reveals something unexpected in the present, the seed of something that will reveal itself in the future. To supplement this with the ‘clinical’ aim of Deleuze’s philosophy of literature, the writer as prophet creates a new diagnosis of the world, a new assemblage of its symptoms, as Sacher Masoch did when he created a new diagnosis termed masochism (cf. Deleuze 1997: 53–5). Masochism, in turn, becomes a label or sign that can be used to fix being, but nonetheless all signs retain the possibility of renewal: ‘Signs imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, they’re the symptoms of life gushing forth or draining away’ (Deleuze 1995: 143). Life in this sense is always at once this particular life, and a singular, virtual force that is its potential to become new, to transcend the limited possibilities offered by the present. Writers like ‘Melville, Dostoevsky, Kafka, or Musil’ can grasp ‘the innermost depths of life and death without leading us back to reason’ (Deleuze 1997: 82), and they do so with characters who themselves act as prophets or bear witness to beings of Primary Nature like Ahab, Bartleby or the Underground Man. Such characters are capable of grasping and understanding, as much as is possible, […] the Primary Nature that so fascinates them, they are nonetheless representatives of secondary nature and its laws. They bear the parental image – they seem like benevolent fathers. […] But they cannot ward off the demons, because the latter are too quick for the law, too surprising. Nor can they save the innocent, the irresponsible: they immolate them in the name of the Law, they make the sacrifice of Abraham. Behind their parental mask, they have a kind of double identification: with the innocent, toward whom they feel a genuine love, but also with the demon. (80–1)

These characters are our ‘witnesses, narrators, interpreters’ (81), sensitive to the light cast by originals on the world and the deterritorializations that they create. Through these narrators, literature can move in the direction of the ill-formed, towards a becoming or zone of proximity rather than a fixed and knowable set of characteristics. And by expanding a process of becoming rather than blocking life as fixed being, literature is an expression of health, understood in Nietzschean terms as the free flow of active forces. Above all, it is the creative, prophetic function of literature that ties this account to the image of resistance with which this chapter began: literature as health consists in the creation of new symptomologies to diagnose a world of active and reactive forces, of ‘inventing

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a people who are missing’ (4), that is a people in whom, to recall Caygill, ‘life [is] no longer shaped by responding to the initiatives of oppression and enemy’ (2015: 104). That Deleuze aligns Melville and Dostoevsky as prophetic writers, in his particular sense of the term, is, of course, noteworthy for this present discussion. Moreover, Deleuze’s designation of witnesses as fathers will prove significant for this reading of Coetzee’s own portrayal of the Russian writer. Nechaev possesses something of the demonic nature that Deleuze finds in Melville’s Ahab, an Original or being of Primary Nature. In Nechaev’s case, it is precisely his ‘originality’ (Coetzee 2004: 112) that marks him as a force beyond reason or ideology. Like Bartleby, the Nechaevian revolutionary is not a rebel per se because, simply, there is nothing particular about him: ‘He has no interests, no feelings, no attachments, not even a name […] he has cut all links with the civil order’ (60–1). The light he casts upon the world is one that reveals a condition of overwhelming resentment and, indeed, ressentiment. He will embody ‘the axe, instrument of the people’s vengeance, weapon of the people, crude, heavy, unanswerable, swung with the full weight of the body behind it, the body and the life’s-weight of hatred and resentment stored up in that body, swung with dark joy’ (114), but, like the demons of Melville or Dostoevsky, his function is not determined by ideas or reason. He shines a light on the world rather than reflecting it, and his capacity for dissent lies in his ability to deterritorialize that world, revealing the persistence of singular, virtual life behind its actuality. Writers and narrators are the witnesses to these originals; they, like Coetzee’s Dostoevsky, ‘seem like good fathers, benevolent fathers’ and ‘have a kind of double identification’ with both ‘the innocent’ – Pavel the child – and the demons – Nechaev, Pavel the revolutionary and, ultimately, his own self as author of Demons. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky frequently worries that he is betraying Pavel, breaking his ‘pact with the innocent’ he loves (Deleuze 1997: 81) and, above all, he seems to be the only character fully sensible to the particular effect of Nechaev. With both Anna and Maximov he disputes their understanding of Nechaev and their willingness to reduce him to an idea. Indeed, he questions Maximov’s ability to read people and texts well at all: Pavel’s papers […] are useless to you. They will tell you nothing about why intelligent men fall under the sway of evildoers. And they will tell you least of all because clearly you do not know how to read. All the time you were reading my son’s story – let me say this – I noticed how you were holding yourself at a distance.

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[…] When you read about Karamzin or Karamzov or whatever his name is, when Karamzin’s skull is cracked open like an egg, what is the truth: do you suffer with him, or do you secretly exult behind the arm that swings the axe? You don’t answer? Let me tell you then: reading is being the arm and being the axe and being the skull; reading is giving yourself up, not holding yourself at a distance and jeering. (Coetzee 2004: 46–7)

Suffering with, not simply identifying with, is true reading according to Dostoevsky: being at once transgressor, transgressed and the weapon of transgression itself. It initiates a process of moving beyond the self, a becomingother in Deleuzian terms. It brings into relation different actors within the literary assemblage as a deterritorialization of the self. Not a process of uncovering the truth of a text, of holding the distanced stance of the critic, but rather, in the post-critical spirit, a co-creative act of world-making (assemblage) and of resistance (becoming). That reading can expand rather than close off the processes of creation and of becoming is a sign of resistance to the present. Just as Bartleby’s formula is deterritorializing through its lack of particularity, so Nechaev’s formula, ‘everything is permitted’, carves out a world of meaningless actions without reason or ideology. However, this Deleuzian reading of The Master of Petersburg need not necessarily lead us towards an understanding of resistance and dissent as a liberating force in every case. Indeed, as Dostoevsky reminds us, Nechaev’s nihilistic force holds out the possibility not merely of ‘equal happiness for all’ but also ‘equal misery’ (36). The intertextual references to Demons reveal the extent to which becoming-other can be a demonic descent, and it is in the final pages of Coetzee’s novel that we find Dostoevsky beginning to draft the chapter that will later be suppressed for its depiction of Stavrogin’s confessed abuse of the elevenyear-old Matryosha whom he seduces and drives to suicide. Here Nechaev and Pavel, no longer the innocent child but ‘Pavel grown beyond childhood and beyond love – grown not in a human manner but in the manner of an insect’ (240), become indistinct, both identified with a demonic revolutionary spirit. At the moment of writing Dostoevsky faces ‘something excessive’ (238), a figure or phantom that pushes him towards this moment of ‘betrayal – betrayal of love first of all, and then of Pavel and the mother and child and everyone else. Perversion: everything and everyone to be turned to another use, to be gripped to him and fall with him’ (235). Such is the fate of the writer-witness to betray those that they love and embrace the demonic: ‘It seems to him a great price to pay. They pay him lots of money for writing books, said the child, repeating

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the dead child. What they failed to say was that he had to give up his soul in return’ (250). In the story that he writes, Pavel is both Stavrogin (through the title of the chapter) and Svidrigailov – he is named as such in the draft (an allusion to the sadistic Arkady Svidrigailov of Crime and Punishment) – while the child Matryona becomes Dusha, the girl that Stavrogin seduces and drives to suicide. Witness to ‘something excessive’ (Coetzee 2004: 238), to ‘things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him […]. The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums’ (Deleuze 1997: 3). The price paid for this encounter in The Master of Petersburg threatens to chip away at the writer’s ‘soul’, to push him towards a becoming-demonic, to an act of creation that is a perversion of ‘everything and everyone’. It is not simply, then, as Dominic Head holds, that ‘demons are consuming ideas which dictate the behaviour of the characters, driving them to desperate and wicked acts’ (1997: 145), but rather that what returns from the encounter with an excess beyond everyday comprehension, an ‘absolute otherness’ in Derek Attridge’s Derridean terms (2004: 132), or a deterritorialization in Deleuze’s, is simply new. As such, Attridge expands, it cannot in advance be aligned to ‘human and social responsibility’ (132) and it has ‘nothing to do with traditional understandings of ethics, or with human responsibility’ (133). All ‘consuming ideas’, Nechaev’s a priori lines of power and totalizing structural analysis of Russian inequality, can, however, co-opt that newness into a territorialized or majoritarian form. Indeed, for Deleuze, every becoming risks returning to the actual world as the ground for a new reification of life, all revolutions risk becoming totalitarian. As we have seen throughout this book, literary dissent moves towards the ill-formed, towards the virtual, Dionysian or active forces as a means to disrupt the status quo without recourse to predetermined ideologies. In turn, those active forces can become the ground for a new assemblage, a new form of community and identification that promises a world without ressentiment, but Coetzee reminds us that it can also lead us towards demonic transgressions. This is not the end of the story, however, since we are still missing a full sense of the role of The Brothers Karamazov, in particular the chapter entitled ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, in shaping Coetzee’s novel. While Dostoevsky ends up betraying those that he loves, giving up his soul, at the novel’s close, the section of The Master of Petersburg that, I argue, most closely recalls ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ chapter, that of his conversation with Nechaev in ‘The Cellar’, culminates in a moment of forgiveness: ‘He takes a step forward and with what seems to him

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the strength of a giant folds Nechaev to his breast. Embracing the boy, trapping his arms at his sides, […] sobbing, laughing, he kisses him on the left cheek and on the right’ (190). This fatherly gesture directly recalls Alyosha’s response to his brother’s heretical story of Christ and the Grand Inquisitor: ‘[…] The formula, “everything is permitted”, I will not renounce, and what then? Will you renounce me for that? Will you?’ Alyosha stood up, went over to him in silence, and gently kissed him on the lips. ‘Literary theft!’ Ivan cried, suddenly going into some kind of rapture. ‘You stole that from my poem! […]’. (Dostoevsky 2004: 263)

Ivan deems this an act of plagiarism since it repeats the conclusion to his story of Christ and the Inquisitor – ‘suddenly he approaches the old man in silence and gently kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips’ (262). Indeed, in Coetzee’s novel, since Dostoevsky himself never actually commits any transgression against the child Matryosha, literary theft is perhaps the greatest crime he is guilty of: he ‘steals’ Pavel’s story of Sergei, Marfa and ‘Karamzin or Karamzov’ (Coetzee 2004: 47) and turns it into The Brothers Karamazov. For Patrick Hayes (2010), who has offered the most thoughtful interrogation of the significance of this intertext to Coetzee’s novel, the antagonism of sons against fathers, which can be traced throughout The Master and its portrayal of revolution, finds its resolution in the Dostoevskian model. Revolution, the novel suggests, can be driven by a demonic, anarchic spirit that has no ideological aim, but it can also take the form of an absolute, structured opposition between foes, in this case, fathers and sons: ‘Nechaev hates the fathers and makes implacable war on them […]. Fathers and sons: foes: foes to the death’ (Coetzee 2004: 239); ‘Not the People’s Vengeance but the Vengeance of the Sons: is that what underlies revolution – fathers envying their sons their women, sons scheming to rob their fathers’ cashboxes?’ (108) The allusion to Dostoevsky’s patricidal novel is clear here: the rivalry between Fyodor Pavlovich and Dimitri over the love of Grushenka, as well as the suspicion cast over the elder son concerning his financial troubles. However, in The Brothers Karamazov the novel resolves itself not in the perpetuation of this antagonism, but in its sublation via the Christ-like forgiveness of Aloysha, the character named after Dostoevsky’s favoured son, who died in childhood.15 By reference to Michael Holquist’s analysis of The Brothers Karamazov, Hayes argues that Dostoevsky’s final novel ‘invites the reader to draw parallels between the Karamazov family story and the Christian story of redemption’ (Hayes 2010: 188) – the Son who embodies

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the death of God, the Father, as atonement for mankind’s sins. The figure of Christ, by this account, signals the transcendence of ‘the binary oppositions between human and divine authority’ (188). While Holquist does draw out the significance of the non-dialectical structure of Dostoevsky’s final work, Hayes perhaps overstates the strictly Christian underpinnings of his reading here. Indeed, Holquist is explicit in rejecting interpretative frameworks drawn from either Christian ethics (such as Rene Girard’s Deceit, Desire and the Novel) or Hegelian notions of totality (such as Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel), since both are premised upon ‘a normative anthropology, an image of the typical man each system would like to produce […]. From the point of view of novel theory, then, ideologies that give rise to world systems are of interest in the degree to which they presuppose proscriptive biographies that may serve, in turn, as norms for narrative’ (Holquist 1977: 172). Of course, this raises the question of whether or not Holquist himself escapes a formulaic, structural analysis of The Brothers Karamazov: his favoured Freudian framework would, for Deleuze, reify the struggle and resistance of the brothers into an Oedipal myth. In Holquist’s terms, however, reading Dostoevsky through the lens of Freud allows us to bypass a transcendent, Christian God as the primary source of meaning; it is, rather, simply an inherent primal urge. As such, we need not see Alyosha in the resolution of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ chapter as imitating Christ, since ‘ideas about God, if Freud is correct, are rooted in ideas about fathers’ (190). The Brothers Karamazov stages different versions of the father–son relation, and finds in Alyosha the son who can overcome ‘some of the worst effects of the either/or condition of the son/father dichotomy that obtained in the primal condition’ (178). This achievement, for Holquist, is inseparable from a process of individuation – ‘Alyosha, like the son of Freud’s legend who becomes a poet, achieves that poet’s goal’ (191), which is to free the individual self from the group. But in doing so, the ‘poet’ is able to relate back to the group through his writings, creating individualistic heroes who nonetheless refigure the collective experience in a new way. In the case of Alyosha, ‘he changes the significance that attached to his name. He has given his father’s name a new meaning, his own meaning’ (191). Even while he overstates the Christian context, it is this transformative process that Hayes finds most productive in relation to Coetzee’s novel: a relation between fathers and sons that escapes the systemic premises of dialectical thought, and through which one might trace the transition from a state of ressentiment under the patriarchal law to one that promises ‘a future covenant of a radically free state – in the time without fathers, or at least without the father-position of power and authority’ (Hayes 2010: 189).

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That Holquist aligns this particular freedom with the poet is of note given Coetzee’s preoccupation with the figure of writer in The Master of Petersburg. By paying attention to the subtle allusions to The Brothers Karamazov in Coetzee’s work, the betrayal of the writer who pens ‘At Tikhon’s’ no longer seems the inevitable outcome: the seeds of the plot left in Pavel’s story, the future son that Dostoevsky hopes to father (raised in Coetzee’s novel as the possible outcome of his relationship with the landlady Anna Sergeyevna, but which history tells us will be the future product of his relationship with his second wife, Anna Grigorievna, and the inspiration for his hero, Alyosha), these signs hold out the possibility not simply of an alternative to the nihilism of Nechaev’s revolutionary action or depravity of Stavrogin’s confession, but of writing beyond the dialectical opposition of father and son, master and slave; of a new form of community of ‘brothers’ without the law of the father, of literature as health. And this is precisely where the encounter with characters of original nature can lead us, according to Deleuze: the reconciliation of originals and those beings of secondary nature which bear witness to them. In Melville, ‘what Captain Vere and the attorney demonstrate is that there are no good fathers. There are only monstrous, devouring fathers, and petrified, fatherless sons. If humanity can be saved, and the originals reconciled, it will only be through the dissolution or decomposition of the paternal function’ (Deleuze 1997: 84). The father, the law, these are the hallmarks of majoritarian forms – a priori systems, to recall Holquist – which stand in judgement over being. Minor literature, the condition of becoming and creativity as an active relation of forces is a transgression of the paternal function and ushers in a new community without filial ties: ‘To liberate man from the father function, to give birth to the new man or the man without particularities, to reunite the original and humanity by constituting a society of brothers as a new universality. In the society of brothers, alliance replaces filiation and the blood pact replaces consanguinity’ (84). Such is a relation premised on affiliation rather than filiation, the dissolution of the individual ego and creation of an assemblage in which the self becomes-other. Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg variously encounters these becomings: in his grief over the death of Pavel the boundaries between father and stepson become blurred – ‘At moments like this he cannot distinguish Pavel from himself. They are the same person; and that person is no more or less than a thought, Pavel thinking it in him, he thinking it in Pavel’ (Coetzee 2004: 21) – as well as those between father and mother – ‘I am his mother and his father, I am everything to him’ (16); and in his search for answers to the mystery of his stepson’s death he feels compelled to embrace all

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forms of life – ‘Pavel will not be saved till he has freed the dog and brought it to his bed, brought the least thing, the beggarmen and the beggarwomen too, and much else he does not yet know of ’ (82). These moments of becoming prefigure his closing act of creation in which he encounters the non-human figure of ‘something excessive’ (238) immediately prior to beginning the writing process, and they reveal a transgression of his strictly paternal authority. In disrupting the coherence of the figure of the father or the law, both Dostoevsky’s and Melville’s minor literature, for Deleuze, reveal the radical potentiality of the Russian and American revolutions, both attempting ‘to transform the world, to rethink a new world or new man insofar as they create themselves’ (1997: 86). This, then, is a revolution that embraces the active forces of the will-to-power, rather than those of a reactive will-to-dominate. Freed from a priori structures and transcendent totalities, such is ‘a world in process, an archipelago. Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others’ (86). Of course, as Coetzee’s novel show us, within every revolutionary moment as much as within every deterritorialization the return of absolutist and totalitarian forms of life threaten – ‘The birth of the nation, the restoration of the nation-state – and the monstrous fathers come galloping back in’ (88) – but equally so too does the ongoing potential for their dissolution – ‘For even in the midst of its failure, the American Revolution continues to send out its fragments, always making something take flight on the horizon’ (89). The writer may fail in their efforts to reconcile originals and secondary nature, to cross the boundary into a fully minor literature beyond language and form, but in diagnosing the conditions of their world they remain ‘the bearer of a collective enunciation which no longer forms part of literary history and preserves the rights of a people to come, or of a human becoming. […] Bartleby is not the patient, but the doctor of a sick America, the Medicine-Man, the new Christ or the brother to us all’ (90). With these lines, Deleuze ends his essay on ‘Bartleby’, but for us they resonate with Alyosha’s ‘imitation’ of Christ in The Brothers Karamazov, a novel which ends with the youngest brother escaping the tyranny of the father and establishing a new community of ‘brothers’, in this case as symbolized by the group of young boys with whom he makes a pact to bind them together in friendship – alliance replacing filiation and a pact in place of consanguinity, to recall Deleuze (1997: 84). Alyosha, as Holquist’s reading argues, is figured as ‘the new Christ’ insofar as he offers a vision of redemption, love and forgiveness without necessarily evoking Christian theology. And it is the expression of love that, I suggest, persists within

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The Master of Petersburg despite the bleakness of the artistic vision offered in the chapter entitled ‘Stavrogin’. Dostoevsky in this moment becomes the doctor of ‘sick’ Russia, and, by extension, Coetzee of ‘sick’ South Africa, through his own act of ‘literary theft’. Like Alyosha however, he is not bound to mimic the mastercopy. Rather, Dostoevsky faces the figure of excess and of deterritorialization (‘a figure […] indifferent to all names, all words’ [Coetzee 2004: 238]) and through that encounter escapes his role as father and author(ity) as he awaits the moment that ‘the true Pavel, visits him unevoked and of his free will’ (239). In other words, Dostoevsky releases his stepson from the command of the father, foreshadowing the achievement of his character yet to come, Alyosha, and, to repurpose Hayes, in doing so, allows the fictionalized author to escape ‘his subject position as father and master’ (2010: 193). But more than that, in diagnosing the ‘sickness’ of a world in which revolutionary action turns into totalitarian oppression and violence, the figure of Dostoevsky, by this Deleuzian model, is ‘the bearer of a collective enunciation […] of a people to come’: a collective no longer bound by the oppositional relation of master and slave, self and other, father and son, but a non-hierarchical affiliation of brothers and sisters. Coetzee’s own reflections on freedom and community suggest a philosophically nuanced understanding of the role of the writer as representative of their community. Indeed, while Coetzee sounds a note of caution regarding such a task, in these comments he nonetheless holds out the possibility that the writer’s role vis-à-vis their community might well be aligned with the dissident work of postcolonial literatures understood as the creation of a people yet-tocome.16 As Coetzee argues in Doubling the Point: I don’t believe that any form of lasting community can exist where people do not share the same sense of what is just and what is not just. To put it another way, community has its basis in an awareness and acceptance of a common justice […]: awareness of an idea of justice, somewhere, that transcends laws and lawmaking. Such an awareness is not absent from our lives. But where I see it, I see it mainly as flickering or dimmed – the kind of awareness you would have if you were a prisoner in a cave, say, watching the shadows of ideas flickering on the walls. To be a herald you would have to have slipped your chains for a while and wandered about in the real world. I am not a herald of community or anything else. […] I  am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations – which are shadows themselves – of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light. I do not imagine freedom, freedom an sich; I do not represent it. Freedom is another name for the unimaginable, says Kant, and he is right. (Coetzee 1992: 340–1)

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To a certain extent, this passage can be regarded as an exercise in ‘awakening the countervoices in oneself ’ (65), since it holds in contradiction a transcendental concept of justice that is at once an ideal and that which secures our tacit acceptance of its ‘common’ practice, and, as its counterpart, a concept of freedom understood in Kantian terms as unrealizable and unrepresentable. Community is the link between the two terms: forging the common, shared sense of what is good, and evoking a notion of freedom as an excess beyond what is currently possible or imaginable. The latter, ‘freedom an sich’ – freedom-in-itself, the noumenon of freedom – is, in the Kantian sense, ‘unimaginable’ insofar as it denotes a horizon that cannot be reached or represented within this actual world. In this way, Plato’s allegory of the cave anticipates aspects of Kantian thought: the division between noumena and phenomena, and the impossibility of reaching the former. For Coetzee, this dilemma is expressly linked to community and the law, since both are compromised when associated with an absolute truth. As a writer he resists responsibility for the articulation of absolutes because, of course, such claims are the stuff of absolutists like Nechaev. The writer does not slip his chains and venture into a world beyond appearance (the noumenal world), but bears witness to the shadows cast by those ‘originals’ as they shine their ‘livid white light’ (Deleuze 1997: 83). No herald of community, the writer nonetheless intimates a future freedom, gestures towards a community of brothers freed from the patriarchal law of fathers and nations. Such is the dissident work of all literature in its minor capacity, and it is by this reading that both postcolonial and world literatures retain their potentiality to challenge sedimentary and unequal social structures in a becoming that reimagines our forms of identification and belonging in the globalized present.

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Enacting Equality: Postcolonialism After World Literature

One and unequal: a literary world that is at once united as a single field but uneven in terms of the capital, visibility or circulation of each individual text that constitutes it. Thanks to Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, whose works begin with this central premise of world-systems theory, this structural principle underlies a prominent strand of contemporary world literature criticism, as evident in materialist studies which focus on the ways in which the capitalist world-system, or, in the words of Aamir Mufti, ‘global relations of force’ (2010: 465), impact on the form and visibility of the world text. In this respect, the work of Mufti (2010, 2016) finds resonance with contemporary postcolonial and world literature scholarship that reveals materialist concerns by focusing on texts which will bear the trace of globalization or which betray a literary field structured by the centre-periphery hierarchy of capitalist modernity.1 As James Graham, Michael Niblett and Sharae Deckard note, what unites materialist approaches to ‘worlding literary criticism’ is a ‘critique of the underlying structures and conditions produced by the international division of labour’ (2012: 465) and as such a direct line can be traced from second wave, Marxist postcolonialism in the hands of Benita Parry, Neil Lazarus and Aijaz Ahmad to this vanguard of twenty-first-century literary criticism. To varying degrees, work which has emerged in this vein promises to retain postcolonialism’s attentiveness to the structures of exclusion and dominance that characterize modernity but, as we have observed throughout this study, it does so by means of an interpretative framework driven by the structural premise of the capitalist world-system. At the forefront of this turn, as we have seen, is the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), whose work has initiated a new critical endeavour focused on ‘worldliterature’ (2015: 8) which deals with texts that bear the signs of the singular and uneven capitalist world-system. It is this last nuance that this present chapter takes forward. While previous chapters have addressed the conceptual

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problems of a critical practice that assumes an a priori notion of the worldsystem, contemporary world literary criticism in its materialist guise, I argue, holds further interest for postcolonial studies in its focus on the unevenness or inequality of capitalism. With Moretti, in particular, WReC observe an important conceptual shift from difference to inequality, one that is of notable significance for that branch of postcolonial studies indebted to poststructuralism. Moretti’s notion of a world literary system that is at once singular and unequal promotes thinking of networks, systems and relationality and is thus distinct from ‘the antecedent lexicon of “post-”theory, which had been disposed to emphasise not comparison but incommensurability, not commonality but difference, not system but untotalisable fragment, not the potential of translation but rather its relative impossibility, and not antagonism but agonism’ (Warwick 2015: 6). World literature by this account is a ‘system [that] is structured not on difference but on inequality’ (7). Of course, some measure of internal differentiation is implicit within any hierarchical or unequal system, but it emerges through comparison, an evaluation of those attributes that the system determines to be discriminating in terms of the hierarchical distribution. In turn, the work of world literary criticism becomes an activity of witnessing or verifying the enactment of inequality within the literary text as such, of observing the ways in which a text ‘show[s] how the idea of combined and uneven development works in the literary realm’ (51): a view that has inspired complementary studies, such as Melissa Kennedy’s Narratives of Inequality, Michael Walonen’s Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism, as well as an emerging strand of materialist critique, which, as Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett argue, seeks to repurpose Jason Moore’s argument that the world-system must be understood as a world-ecology and, as such, ‘from this perspective, world literature must equally be understood as literature of the capitalist world-ecology. Or, to put it another way, the world-ecology will necessarily be discernible in any modern literary work’ (Campbell and Niblett 2016: 8).2 While WReC’s specific claim that ‘the literary “registration” of the world-system does not (necessarily) involve criticality or dissent’ (Warwick 2015: 20) might, from the postcolonial perspective pursued in this study, cede too much ground to the stability of the system, the shift from difference to inequality as the primary orientation of this new theoretical paradigm is appealing as a way to move beyond the impasse of postcolonial studies caught between poststructuralism and Marxism. By focusing on the way in which inequality is enacted in the text itself, this approach

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initially promises to satisfy both positions: for the Marxist who despairs at the poststructuralist’s choice to focus on the disruptive effects of discourse rather than real-world actors, the turn to networks and relationality promotes the text as one actor among many others, one which has the capacity to affect and create alternative forms of solidarity through the enactment of inequality; for the poststructuralist who reminds us that those Marxists too easily forget that their object of study is literature and ‘it is not enough, then, simply to condemn the theory for its inadequate attention to other disciplines like “political economy”. […] However objectionable it may be, postcolonial theory merits evaluation as an interpretation of literature as such’ (Hallward 2001: 334), they too will find comfort in the priority afforded to the literary text as the site in which inequality is staged. Indeed, it is a structural premise which connects a diverse range of postcolonial and world literature scholarship: uniting world-systems theorists – Nicholas Brown (2005), Casanova (2004), Medovoi (2011), Moretti (2013), WReC (2015) – with those employing world-ecology as a companion term – Campbell and Niblett (2016), Deckard (2012), Niblett (2012) – as well as recent proponents of ‘world bank literature’ (Kumar 2002) under a critical practice that seeks to uncover the unequal realities produced under the sign of globalization. While this attentiveness to inequality offers a productive readjustment of the lens of postcolonial critique, as we have seen throughout Postcolonialism After World Literature, several philosophical problems are left unanswered by this approach. Network, connectivity and relationality have been recurring themes in the previous three chapters; however, those philosophers whose works have informed my discussion of these terms – Bruno Latour, Édouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze – cannot easily be reconciled to an ontology which proceeds from the assumption of a totalizing, antagonistic (or perhaps, better, dialectical) system in which subjects take their place within a hierarchy by merit of attributes determined by both the shared condition of their existence within a singular system (what WReC call ‘commonality’) and their comparatively unequal attainment of privileged values within that system (‘comparison’). To recall Latour, ‘nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else’ (1993b: 158): in other words, no actor can be said to be wholly contingent to nor wholly isolated from the network within which they operate. What Latour, Glissant and Deleuze share is a philosophy that refuses any a priori system and which instead analyses actors in a process of becoming and, as such, as always relational and opaque to use Glissant’s term: that is, they retain something irreducible to that relation. To adapt WReC’s focus on inequality to the

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relational, immanent philosophies explored throughout this study will require a re-evaluation of the systemic nature of world literature theory in terms that emphasizes the constructed and provisional status of any hierarchical system: a theory, in other words, which retains a system’s capacity for redistribution, rebalancing and reconfiguration. But, to refocus on another element of WReC’s proposal, what if rather than starting from the premise of inequality we assume first the equality of actors? What if, rather than posing a theory that hopes to explain inequality, that, in the words of Moretti, focuses on ‘examples [which] confirm the inequality of the world literary system […] [that is] internal to the unequal system’ (Moretti 2013: 115) of global, economic capitalism, we turn our attention to that which stages the primary equality of actors within the worldliterary assemblage? This is precisely the challenge that Jacques Rancière posed to philosophy, aesthetics and political thought and it is the aim of this chapter to explore the implications of his argument for contemporary postcolonial and world literature and critical theory.3 In doing so, we will observe the common ground shared between Rancière, Deleuze and Latour as each sets out a philosophy of literature and its dissident function in a world of connected and incommensurable actors.

Confronting the consensus: Politics as dissensus In Rancière’s long history of thought what unites philosophy from Plato to Marxist theories of capital and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu is a common elevation of the analyst above his subject. In that respect, Rancière’s work foreshadows Latourian post-criticism which rejects the Kantian division of spheres and the Marxist diagnosis of a primary, unconscious socio-economic structure as a work’s hidden subtext, and instead posits, as Rita Felski has argued, that ‘rather than looking behind the text – for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives – we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible’ (2015: 12). In the same vein, Rancière’s philosophy eschews interpretative models that seek to uncover the hidden truth behind an object of inquiry, which for him is a replication of the hierarchical pedagogy he challenges in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. In part a reflection on his own studies under Althusser, in this work Rancière opposes the premise of the teacher as the figure of authority, disseminating knowledge and truth to their unknowing students, with the pedagogical practice of Joseph Jacotot, which

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assumed the equality of intelligence between teacher and taught (cf. Rancière 1991). The wider issue at work in, what we might recognize as, Rancière’s postcritical gesture, then, is equality. It is in The Philosopher and His Poor that we encounter Rancière’s dialogue with Plato, Marx and Bourdieu, and like Latour, he too takes particular issue against Bourdieu’s sociology, which begins with a structure (one that is unequal – capitalism) and proceeds to uncover evidence of its effectiveness everywhere – as Latour argues ‘behavior is now “explained” by the powerful effects of indisputable matters of fact: […] forces you are not conscious of […] fields of discourse, social domination, race, class, and gender’ (2004: 238), which are apparent only to the critic. In a similar manner, as Joseph Tanke argues, Rancière proposes a philosophy and ‘form of analysis [that] does not claim to strike upon the ultimate meaning of these forms, only to indicate how they appear, the logic of their relations, the conditions of their historical possibility, the meanings they have been given, and the overall picture to which they give rise’ (2011: 3). Tracing the production, constitution and relationality of forms is an indication, I suggest, of the potential overlap between Rancière’s philosophy and Latour’s actor-network theory, as both refuse to essentialize their object of study or presume a privileged knowledge of its hidden foundations or source. What Rancière adds, although I would suggest that Latour’s parliament of things leads us in a comparable direction, is a focus on equality, since what links Plato, Marx and Bourdieu (and, as we have seen, world literature theory in its materialist guise) is not simply the privilege of the critical stance, but a philosophy grounded in an assumed inequality between actors. In order to understand Rancière’s philosophy we can begin with his account of Plato’s Republic, which, he claims, institutes a hierarchy of classes – workers, soldiers and the philosopher-king – in which each individual citizen occupies a role determined by their inherent characteristics or type. The Philosopher and His Poor dubs this Plato’s ‘lie’ because it is a fiction: there is no rational or metaphysical justification for this hierarchy, rather myth is employed, that of the three metals (gold, silver and bronze) as an analogue of the three social classes, in the creation of the imagined community.4 In this moment, to hark back to the Moretti of Chapter One, literature as myth has the function of creating consent: where there are no natural or metaphysical grounds upon which a social hierarchy can be justified then one must be invented and presented as if it is a natural fact.5 Thus, as Rancière argues, ‘the barrier of orders is the barrier of the lie. […] Each [citizen of Plato’s republic] was obliged to do the one task for which nature destined him. But the function is an illusion just as

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nature is. All that remains is the prohibition’ (2003: 29). If the founding myth which justifies the hierarchy is revealed as a fiction, then ‘all that remains is the prohibition’, the lie or wrong upon which the imagined community is founded. However, much more is at stake once this wrong becomes the foundation of a democratic state. Rancière’s Disagreement begins with Aristotle and once again we have a tripartite hierarchy (the rich oligarchy, the virtuous aristocracy and the people or demos) but the foundational premise is one of freedom; a ‘myth of origins’, ‘a pure invention’ that stems from the moment that enslavement as a punishment for debt was abolished in Athens which had the effect of making ‘the appearance of freedom […] the positive property of the people as a part of the community’ (1999: 7). This begins to take us towards Rancière’s precise sense of equality and its function in the enactment of politics: ‘For the wrong is not just the class struggle, internal dissension to be overcome by giving the city its principle of unity, by founding the city on the arkhê – starting point or basis – of community. It is the very impossibility of arkhê’ (13). The problem with Plato’s republic was an arkhê that presented a fiction as a natural fact, a state of affairs that required the creation of consenting citizens; the problem of the democratic state, Rancière contends, is not merely that it makes of the arkhê a fiction that requires participants to buy into it, but that it makes the notion of arkhê itself an impossibility. This is because democracy promises a paradox: a common good that all share but which is enjoyed only by the privileged few. Or, in other words, the absolute equality and freedom of all citizens and a structural inequality which regulates whose voice can be heard, whose actions are visible. As Rancière argues: From Athens in the fifth century B.C. up until our own governments, the party of the rich has only ever said one thing, which is most precisely the negation of politics: there is no part of those who have no part. [...] In contemporary euphemism, the proposition is put differently: there are only parts of society – social majorities and minorities, socioprofessional categories, interest groups, communities, and so on. There are only parts that must be converted into partners. But under the policed forms of contractual society and of government by consultation […] the fundamental proposition remains the same: there is no part of those who have no part. There are only the parts of parties. In other words, there is no politics, nor should there be. […] Politics is the sphere of activity of a common that can only ever be contentious, the relationship between parts that are only parties and credentials or entitlements whose sum never equals the whole. (14)

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This quote is a distillation of Rancière’s political philosophy and requires some unpacking. Aristotle’s Politics leaves us with a state in which each part has an assigned role or party, but the part of the demos is contradictory as it functions as an empty category: ‘The people are nothing more than the undifferentiated mass of those who have no positive qualification – no wealth, no virtue – but who are nonetheless acknowledged to enjoy the same freedom as those who do’ (8). Freedom, ‘the positive property of the people as a part of the community’ (7), is applied equally to all, but the demos ‘have no positive qualification’, it is the part that has no part in the community, so cannot partake in the common good, freedom. Thus politics has a very particular meaning for Rancière. It is not the disputes of political parties or interest groups, rather, it is the moment in which the part that has no part demonstrates their equality: it is the act that makes visible those that were rendered invisible, and audible those voices that were silenced. If Plato’s lie revealed to us that ‘no social order is based on nature, no divine law regulates human society’ (16), then the equality promised by the democratic state emerges as an ‘empty freedom’ insofar as it ‘is simply the equality of anyone at all with anyone else’ (15), a paradox that extends to the undifferentiated mass of those ‘without qualities’, those who have ‘no part in anything’ (9) as well as to those parties who do. The arkhê is not merely a fiction but constituted by an absence, ‘the ultimate anarchy on which any hierarchy rests’ (16). Rancière’s philosophy, like that of Latour and Deleuze, is a rejection of a priori structures as the foundation of being. Just as inequality has no transcendental justification, so equality is neither a natural given nor essential quality of a thing, but simply ‘a mere assumption that needs to be discerned within the practices implementing it’ (33): ‘we don’t know that men are equal. We are saying that they might be. This is our opinion, and we are trying, along with those who think as we do, to verify it. But we know that this might is the very thing that makes a society of humans possible’ (1991: 73). He does, then, prioritize an assumed equality as the baseline of his thinking and he does so because of the contingency of inequality. ‘In the final analysis, inequality is only possible through equality’ (1999: 17) because experience tells us that ‘there is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey […] you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you. It is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order’ (16). Here we see, as we did with Latour and Deleuze, that the philosopher is not denying that order, hierarchies

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or structures exist within society, but he asks us to approach them as constructed via relational processes rather than a priori foundations: ‘the affirmative nature of equality and the construction of a scene whereby equality is confirmed. That’s something that for me establishes a radical break with those who say that first you have to study the specific historical form of inequality, and so to understand the logic of the system’ (Rancière 2016: 112). And, as with Latour and Deleuze, because they are constructed they are open to change – they might make a future ‘society of humans possible’ by confronting an unequal society with its equality. As Julian Brown in his analysis of contemporary South African politics argues, the contingency of inequality ‘as the product of a series of particular decisions, practices, and habits’ demonstrates that ‘it is not […] natural. And it can be changed’ (2015: 149). For Rancière, as Brown acknowledges, this is the activity of politics. Order and hierarchy are created through mechanisms he names the police. Politics is the confrontation of that order or world with an alternative account: Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account, […] the contradiction of two worlds in a single world: the world where they are and the world where they are not, the world where there is something ‘between’ them and those who do not acknowledge them as speaking beings who count [a difference, an inequality or imbalance of qualities] and the world where there is nothing. (Rancière 1999: 27)

Here Rancière strays into the territory of postcolonial theory noted at the outset of this chapter: the confrontation of two views of the world: on the one hand, one that can be characterized as maintaining that ‘there is something “between”’ those who do and those who do not have a part, in other words a difference, an inequality, and, on the other, one in which ‘there is nothing’, a contradictory concept of equality which holds simply the equality of anyone with anyone else despite the hierarchy which denies it. Difference, as Glissant cautioned, institutes a scale of judgement, invites a comparison by which the other is measured by their difference from the self. While such comparisons are of course always possible, they are like the social order itself, Rancière would argue, a ‘sheer contingency’ (15). As such, a social world ordered by difference or inequality is always the site of a possible contestation or dispute by those who seek to demonstrate the equality that must first be assumed by any enactment of inequality. Politics takes the form of ‘dissensus’ for Rancière in that its opposite, the police, is concerned with ‘the distribution of places and roles, and of the systems

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for legitimizing this distribution’ (28). Politics, then, is that which breaks, disrupts and dissembles that sensible order by ‘mak[ing] visible what had no business being seen, and mak[ing] heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise’ (30). The affinities with Spivak’s subaltern are striking for the postcolonial scholar: Spivak’s contention that the racial, gendered subaltern figure ‘cannot speak’ (2010: 41) insofar as the historical colonial archive affords them no space within which they can make their voices heard or their agency visible finds its counterpart in Rancière’s philosophy of politics as dissensus. The work of the intellectual, then, concerns not representation as Spivak’s original essay argued, but rather an activity of tracing moments of dissensus in which previously silenced or hidden subaltern actors are registered.6 Such acts, we can add after Rancière, are not an expression of the subaltern’s difference but of their equality. Dissensus is the act of staging one’s equality, of demonstrating that the definition of the common good extends to those who were not ‘counted’ as equals by the police order. Rancière’s example is the Parisian tailors’ strike of 1833 in which better working conditions and pay were sought by means of a demonstration of the universal applicability of the 1830 Charter which claimed all French citizens to be equal under the law.7 From a postcolonial perspective, the Haitian Revolution repeats this dissensus: the black slaves of Saint-Domingue looked to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen which pronounced all men free and equal, and demonstrated that they too belonged to the category of man and citizen. On both counts the ‘lie’ of democracy is laid bare: a claim to freedom and of a common good is pronounced as if it extends to all citizens, and those who find themselves discounted and excluded by the practice of that common good demonstrate their equal share in it. The assumption of this enactment is, as I have noted, equality rather than difference, but that does not make of Rancière a philosopher for whom the ‘otherness’ we have encountered in Deleuze (the virtual), Latour (plasma) and Glissant (opacity) is redundant. As has been argued throughout this book, these concepts are vital in any philosophical account of newness, creativity and the reimagining of forms of belonging, community and solidarity that refigure the current social body. In other words, while with Rancière we have found a means to rethink postcolonialism not as an articulation of difference but as an enactment of equality, this does not mean that the dissident, future-orientated work of postcolonial literature and literary critique argued for throughout Postcolonialism After World Literature is disregarded. Rather, he, like Deleuze and Latour, maintains that politics or what he calls dissensus cannot be said to function ‘on the basis of any pre-existing

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subject’ (Rancière 2010: 28), removing any a priori concept from his thought as the transcendental ground of philosophy. The demos, then, is not totalizable, and it is not a part that has been overlooked nor ‘a sum of the parts, of the population’; it is, rather, ‘a rupture with the logic of the arkhê’, ‘an abstract supplement in relation to any actual (ac)count of the parts of the population’ (33). We must, therefore, refine the shift from difference to equality noted above. Just as Glissant in Poetics of Relation argues for a right to opacity rather than difference understood as a scale, so Rancière must be read as distinguishing between difference-as-identity and a radical otherness or difference-in-itself as that which escapes codification.8 Dissensus is the enactment of this difference as a deterritorialization and, in turn, equality is a becoming (in the Deleuzian sense). Equality, as Tanke argues, can be considered as ‘virtual. Provided one does not conclude that is it unreal or without the ability to generate effects’ (2011: 58). Later in this chapter I will return to the complementarity and differences between the aesthetic theories of Rancière and Deleuze, but for now it is important to recognize the role afforded to the virtual in both philosophies. Todd May elucidates the impact of Rancière’s understanding of equality and dissensus on typical notions of political action, most notably identity politics. Although not directly evoking Deleuze, May reads dissensus as an act of deterritorialization: ‘Politics, then, is a process of declassification. It is a process of abandoning the identity one has been given’ (2008: 50).9 Rancière’s politics, May argues, is simply the ‘dissensus that disrupts the police order’ (72), but ‘not to impose a new order, as though the old order had simply been mistaken in its categorization’ (70). Oliver Davis, in a direct response to May, cautions against the wholesale rejection of identity politics as a means to challenge the hierarchical police order – the strategic use of identity categories such as queer, Davis contents, can serve as the basis upon which demands for equality may be asserted (2010: 88–90). This is familiar territory for a Deleuzian scholar and, indeed, Žižek in The Ticklish Subject contrasts the philosophy of Rancière and Alain Badiou, finding in the former a tendency to celebrate deterritorializations that disrupt the police order via a virtual concept of equality at the expense of an account of their subsequent reterritorialization within the police order (cf. Žižek 1999). As was discussed in Chapter Three, Deleuze is misunderstood as a philosopher of the virtual alone and rather it is in the moments of deterritorialization registered within the actual that the force of becoming lies. A moment of deterritorialization disrupts the actual by a movement from fixed forms of being to their singularity to return, to be

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actualized or reterritorialized, as difference. As an enactment of becoming, actualization is the creation of new identities, symptomologies and worlds some of which may be appropriated to the service of oppressive regimes (the return of the law, father or nation), but they will nonetheless hold out the potential for future deterritorialization. It is this dualistic process that Rancière’s philosophy evokes. As Davis argues, ‘the emphasis falls in a difference place in Rancière’s and Badiou’s accounts of emancipatory politics – on interruption and inscription respectively – without seeking to champion one at the expense of the other’ (2010: 95). Rancière is drawn to moments of dissensus, the enactment of politics under the virtual sign of equality, but with that is an accompanying moment of reconfiguration, the moment at which the boundaries which determine who counts as a citizen, whose voice is heard, and whose actions are registered as visible affects, are redrawn anew. Finally, it is because that reterritorialization stems from a rupture in the police order, a supplement or difference that cannot be measured, that it returns not as the same but as a newly configured space with new possibilities for ‘what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it’ (Rancière 2010: 37). On these grounds, Rancière and Deleuze offer complementary accounts of the radical forces of becoming and newness as the always-present potential for disruption and dissent. With Rancière, this chapter argues that the registration that WReC envisioned in their renewed concept of ‘world-literature’ can be reimagined as the performance or creative staging of equality rather than inequality. Freed from a priori structures of capitalism or unconscious motives and desires, his philosophy asks us to assemble and verify moments of dissensus which enact an assumed fundamental equality between actors. That does not mean that hierarchical structures cannot emerge, but if they do so they are produced through the relational network that is the actual world, rather than structural givens that prefigure its contents. As a process, any structure is then open to change and reconfiguration: this is a basic premise that unites the philosophies of Latour, Deleuze and Rancière, and which reveals their potential for postcolonial and world literature scholarship concerned with the ongoing challenge to the neocolonial present as well as the possibilities of a postcolonial future yet-tocome. Dissensus is politics as the demonstration of equality by revealing another world than that of the police order: it is ‘the demonstration of a possible world in which the argument [of those who do not count] could count as an argument […]. It is the construction of a paradoxical world that puts together two separate worlds’ (Rancière 2010: 39). We have already seen in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry

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of Utmost Happiness one example of a postcolonial writer who, in a single world (that of the novel), confronts the order of the state with an alternative world: as Anjum tells the film crew, ‘we’ve come from there … from the other world’ (2017: 110). This confrontation of worlds – one that confirms the current police order and one in which the equality of the discounted subaltern is made visible – is the political work (dissensus) of postcolonial literature as it seeks to realize a future in which the entire framework of colonial ressentiment is overcome. It is the work too of world literature as a dissident force: confronting the lie upon which the global hierarchy is founded and enacting the equality that is betrayed in the very production of inequality. This is world literature that begins with the primary assumption of equality rather than a literary world that is one and unequal. Roy offered us one example of this relational, dissident and constructivist work of the imagination; in the next section I want to turn to another recent example: Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. A contemporary reworking of the Antigone myth, this novel enacts a confrontation with the police order or state and in so doing stakes a claim for the visibility and audibility of those that the former would try to discount as citizens.

Citizens of nowhere: Antigone, again Antigone, Hanif Kureishi notes, ‘is a particularly modern heroine. She is a rebel, a refusenik, a feminist, an anti-capitalist’ (2016: viii). This view of Antigone as a dissident figure has a long history and her transgression of Creon’s decree has been read as a challenge to the consensus of her community that weighs human or juridical law against the unwritten laws of the gods (Hegel), morality against desire (Lacan), and which contests heteronormativity (Butler) and legality itself (Žižek). By focusing on Antigone’s challenge to the laws and norms which govern her political community, philosophical readings of the classical figure have exploited her excessive, monstrous, disruptive force. There is, of course, no philosophical agreement over the significance of Sophocles’ tragic heroine, but the identification of her as a disruptive force holds out the possibility that a political, rather than ethical or psychoanalytical, reading of Antigone can be pursued in Rancièrian terms. Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim, for example, argues that ‘as a figure for politics, she points somewhere else, not to politics as a question of representation but to that political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability are exposed’

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(2000: 2). By making Antigone a liminal figure, one that appears to us at ‘the limits [of] representation’, Butler plays on the Hegelian view, posited in The Phenomenology of Spirit, of Antigone as the conflict of two moral codes – loyalty to one’s kin (as demonstrated by Antigone) versus loyalty to the state (as demanded by Creon) – which resolves when ‘kinship must give way to state authority as the final arbiter of justice’ (4–5). Hegel makes of Antigone a figure who ‘finds no place within citizenship […] because she is not capable of offering or receiving recognition within the ethical order’ (13), or what Rancière would call the police order. Rather than viewing Antigone as representative of a familial ethics fated to cede to that of the state, or, as Lacan does, turning her act into an expression of a monstrous desire that cannot be supported within the symbolic order, Butler asks what we might gain by understanding her ‘death precisely [as] a limit that requires to be read as that operation of political power that forecloses what forms of kinship will be intelligible, what kinds of lives can be countenanced as living’ (29). With both Hegel and Lacan, in Butler’s view, Antigone is representative of an excluded other that can never be incorporated into the count that constitutes the polis; she is a Mephistophelian spirit who always negates. But, foreshadowing Rita Felski’s request for a critical theory that eschews the negative ground of critique and focuses on the performance of the text itself, Butler also considers the staging of Antigone’s act as one that offers ‘the occasion for a reading of a structurally contained notion of kinship in terms of its social iterability, the aberrant temporality of the norm’ (29). In other words, Antigone can be read as a demonstration of the ways in which norms of kinship come to be what they are and, thus, as with every enactment of becoming (a repetition of difference rather than the same) it suggests to us that those norms might yet become something different. Goethe himself questioned philosophical interpretations of Sophocles’ drama, such as that of Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs, which was ‘spoilt’ by following his teacher, Hegel, and his interpretation of Antigone as the staging of the essential conflict between kinship and state, remarking to Eckermann that ‘we are indeed all members both of a family and of a state, and a tragical fate does not often befal [sic] us which does not wound us in both capacities’ (Goethe 1906: 225; cf. entries 21–8 March 1827). Butler preserves Antigone as an in-between figure, however, to demonstrate the tension between acts of deterritorialization and territorialization, dissensus and the consensus of the police order. Her acts constitute a transgression of the role allotted to her as a woman and a sister: in her disobedience, Butler argues, ‘she repeats […] the defiant act of her brother,

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thus offering a repetition of defiance that […] situates her as the one who may be substituted for him and, hence, replaces and territorializes him’ (2000: 11). Polyneices who has been excluded from the Theban community, who no longer counts and, as such, is denied a burial, is reterritorialized by his sister as she performs the rites/rights due to him as a citizen. In order to do so, Antigone must invoke the unwritten laws of the gods rather than the dictates of the state and in that moment she once again moves in the direction of the unintelligible, a ‘law beyond law, beyond conceptualization’ (33). Butler’s Antigone, thus, both evokes the norms and laws of the state and, at the same time, is in excess of them. Such a situation, Butler argues, is akin to Giorgio Agamben’s observation that ‘we live increasingly in a time in which populations without full citizenship exist within states’ (Butler 2000: 81), or, I argue, to Rancière’s portrayal of the demos excluded by the law of the absent arkhê which purports to encompass it. The state of exception, by Butler’s account, functions in the interstices between legitimacy and illegitimacy, citizen and those counted as less than human, and, as such, Antigone ‘functions as a chiasm within the vocabulary of political norms’ (82). To put a particularly Rancièrian spin on this, Antigone demonstrates her equality by performing her capacity to use the language of the human even while in her monstrous desire (for Lacan) she appears as ‘not of the human’ (82). Moreover, by her actions she refigures the sensible boundaries of gender and kinship, creating ‘a new field of the human, […] the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws’ (82). This is the political Antigone in Rancière’s precise sense: contesting the police order and reconfiguring the sensible through an act of dissensus which makes intelligible that which was previously dismissed as mere noise and visible acts which were previously obscured. Both Tina Chanter and Bonnie Honig read Antigone as staging the possibilities of alternative forms of belonging and community, of, in Chanter’s words, ‘a future of a politics yet to come’ (2010: 22). Honig is explicit in drawing the connection with Rancière on this point, arguing that in performing both her equality (by demanding that her speech is not dismissed as mere animal noise) and her singularity (she always resists full incorporation into the body of the state) Antigone can ‘inform a democratic theory project that seeks not to interrupt one with the other, […] but rather (borrowing Jacques Rancière’s terms) to “work the interval” between them’ (Honig 2013: 193). By focusing on the ‘interval’ or tension between citizen and non-citizen within Sophocles’ play, Honig, like Chanter, resists the negative foundation of Hegel’s, Lacan’s, Žižek’s

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and, to some extent, Butler’s readings. As Honig argues, the aim of her book Antigone, Interrupted is ‘to break many theorists’ fascination with rupture over the everyday, powerlessness over sovereignty, and heroic martyrdom over the seemingly dull work of maintenance, repair, and planning for possible futures’ (2). Rupture or the act of interruption, in Honig’s view, can only become the ground for politics when it maintains its dualistic aspect as the sway of forces (in Nietzsche’s sense) between active and reactive, dissensus and consensus, deterritorialization and territorialization, ‘equality, as when two people interrupt each other to knit together a conversation in tandem, and inequality, as when one party must yield the floor, as it were, to the other’ (13).10 Both Žižek and Butler offer a political version of Antigone, which can, as suggested above, be aligned with the work of dissensus: as Zukauskaite summarizes, Žižek’s Lacanian account of Antigone’s ‘transgression [presents the act as] the violation of a norm, but at the same time it creates a new understanding of what counts as a norm’ (Zukauskaite 2010: 71–2). This is precisely what Žižek celebrates in Lacan’s seminar on Antigone – ‘Lacan argues for the possibility that the Order of Being does not predetermine everything: from time to time, something genuinely New can emerge ex nihilo, out of nowhere (i.e. precisely out of the gaps in the edifice of the universe)’ (Žižek 2002: 176) – and in the preface to his own dramatic reworking of Antigone he acknowledges that Butler seeks to employ Agamben to achieve similar ends. Butler, he argues, ‘interpret[s] her as a proto-modern emancipatory heroine who speaks for all those excluded from the public domain, all those whose voices are not heard; in short for what Agamben calls homo sacer’ (Žižek 2016: xxi).11 Two problems, Žižek argues, follow from this assertion: first, that ‘there is no place in Agamben for the “democratic” project of “renegotiating” the limit which separates full citizens from homo sacer by gradually allowing their voices to be heard; his point is, rather, that […] we are all homo sacer’ (xxiii); and secondly, that ‘Antigone formulates her claim on behalf of all those who, like the sans-papiers in today’s France, are without a full and definite socio-ontological status’ (xxii. Emphasis added). Rancière shares the first of these concerns, if we consider Antigone as the foundation of an ethical community rather than a political figure of dissensus. Rancière reveals his scepticism about the figure of Antigone insofar as, in the hands of Hegel, Lacan and Butler, she has (in different ways) become emblematic for the ethical turn in modern philosophy, which, for him, is compromised from the perspective of human rights. Political philosophy has typically framed human rights as a zone of legality torn between, on the one hand, ‘the apolitical human […] without rights’ and, as its radical other,

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that which has rights and thus is ‘“other than human” [which] has historically been called “citizen”’ (Rancière 2006a: 9). Politics in Rancière’s sense can emerge when ‘the gap between the human and the citizen’ is reconfigured through acts of dissensus. However, we find ourselves now in an age of consensus, of ethics as the erasure of differences between human and citizen. While Burke, Marx and Ardent hold out the possibility of dissensus, Rancière argues that Lyotard’s particular glossing of this fundamental pairing of human and citizen assumes an ethical dimension and thus ‘this “other than human” undergoes a radical mutation. He is no longer the citizen who complements the human. He is the inhuman who separates him from himself ’ (9). Agamben’s homo sacer repeats this radical shift towards consensus in political thought: as he argues, ‘the fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is […] exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion’ (Agamben 1998: 8). As Žižek implies (his specific focus is not Rancière), neither of these can be regarded as the premise of politics in Rancière’s sense because there is no ‘“renegotiating” [of] the limit which separates full citizens from homo sacer’ (Žižek 2016: xxiii). There can be no dissensus since political activity is shifted on to the negative ground of the subject who ‘separates and opposes himself ’ in an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The ‘inclusive exclusion’ for Rancière is emphatically not politics; it is the lie upon which the arkhê of democracy and its consensus is founded, and which creates the demos as the part that has no part. As an exercise in ethics, the philosophical models offered by Lyotard and Agamben resolve the tension that is constitutive of politics, insofar as that by offering no clear distinction between human and citizen there is no opportunity to ‘ “work the interval” between them’ (Honig 2013: 145). Agamben’s homo sacer cannot operate in these terms because ‘he who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable’ (Agamben 1998: 28. Emphasis added). The threshold, in this case, no longer holds out the possibility of a contestation between dissensus and consensus, active and reactive forces, deterritorialization and territorialization as these immanent dualities are subsumed in an otherness that makes the two ‘indistinguishable’. Indeed, this is why Oedipus rather than Antigone strikes Rancière as a figure more appropriate for politics: Antigone is a trauma ‘without beginning or end’ since, like homo sacer, the tragic heroine

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initiates a form of inclusive exclusion insofar as she undermines Creon’s law and the social order that he represents ‘by the very thing that supports them: the powers of filiation, of earth and night’ (Rancière 2006a: 5). What excludes her from Thebes, in other words, is precisely the criteria which orders the social consensus. Oedipus, on the other hand, presents us with a ‘trauma [that] was the forgotten event whose reactivation could cure the wound’ (5). In this gesture towards memorialization and a future moment of healing, or the belated recognition of ‘a right not yet recognised’ (6) (the transformations rather than ressentiment induced by the wounding event, Deleuze and Guattari [1994: 159] might say) we can begin to sense where Rancière and Butler align. As Honig argues, while Rancière disapproves of an ethical Antigone, especially one aligned with the ethical turn which replaces the divisions within the sensible (the basis of politics for Rancière) with a new focus on ‘a miasmic evil that destroys everything and just generates paralysis or violence in response’ (2013: 20), a political Antigone whose act memorializes and names those that would be otherwise hidden and excluded from citizenship or history is at one with his view of art and literature. As he makes clear, it is not the act of memorialization or of ‘giv[ing] back names to those who had been deprived of them by the State’ (Rancière 2006a: 11) that Rancière objects to, but, rather, the attempt to do so as the commemoration of a generalized universal category of the human, an ‘indistinct community’ or ‘the witnessing of the non-representable’ (12). Thus, in the case of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, what was rendered invisible and, therefore, ‘what had to be made visible, [was the fact] that the victims of this mass murder were all individuals. They had to be given their names, an inscription in the order of discourse and memorial, because indifference to all these deaths in fact prolongs a certain invisibility’ (Rancière, Baronian and Rosello 2008: 8). But this, of course, raises Žižek’s second point: does Butler’s reading of Antigone as homo sacer posit her as representative of those excluded and silenced by the police order? For this reason, Žižek dubs Antigone a ‘protototalitarian figure’ (2002: 157), while Creon is a political pragmatist even while he ruthlessly suppresses all opposition: Creon acts in the interests of civic peace, while Antigone contravenes the collective will. Indeed Kureishi, in his preface to Žižek’s own contemporary rewriting of Antigone, draws a similar conclusion, noting that ‘there’s no solidarity or community in her actions. She is a rebel but not a revolutionary’ (2016: ix). Certainly, Žižek’s own rewriting of Sophocles’ play, which in the style of Run Lola Run posits three alternative endings, staged consecutively, holds out the possibility of the isolated individual

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giving way to the collective as it stages, first, the ending we expect (Antigone’s imprisonment and suicide as the result of her unconditional adherence to the unwritten laws of the gods, especially those due to the Underworld), as well as, finally, one in which the chorus as sign of the collective will ‘imposes a new rule of law, installing people’s democracy in Thebes’ (Žižek 2016: xxiv), one that puts an end to the totalitarianism of Antigone as well as to the aristocratic rule of Creon. This alternative, however, offers another form of consensus, that of the collective rather than individual will. Dissensus, on the other hand, is the act of reconfiguring the sensible not in the name of an invisible community or individual who claims to stand in their place as representative, but simply the demonstration of the shared and equal right of all to count, to be heard and to be seen. This present chapter is not concerned with resolving the question of whether or not Sophocles’ Antigone comes to act as representative of the silenced and obscured subaltern; I aim to interrogate more particularly Kamila Shamsie’s recent rewriting of the drama in Home Fire. This novel takes inspiration from Seamus Heaney’s 2004 translation The Burial at Thebes, commissioned by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and, as Heaney notes, in writing this play he was struck by the relevance of Sophocles’ tragedy to the contemporary political climate: Early in 2003, the situation that pertains in Sophocles’ play was being reenacted in our own world. Just as Creon forced the citizens of Thebes into an either/or situation in relation to Antigone, the Bush administration in the White House was using the same tactic to forward its argument for war on Iraq. Creon puts it to the Chorus in these terms: Either you are a patriot, a loyal citizen, and regard Antigone as an enemy of the state because she does honour to her traitor brother, or else you yourselves are traitorous because you stand up for a woman who has broken the law and defied my authority. And Bush was using a similar strategy, asking, in effect: Are you in favour of state security or are you not? If you don’t support the eradication of this tyrant in Iraq and the threat he poses to the free world, you are on the wrong side in ‘the war on terror’. (Heaney 2005: 76)12

For Heaney, President Bush’s proclamation that ‘either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’ in the context of the post-9/11 war on terror struck a chord with the absolutism of Creon’s decree and punishment of Antigone.13 But it resonated too with the history of Irish nationalism: ‘I remembered the opening lines of Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill’s [eighteenth-century] lament, an outburst of grief and anger from a woman whose husband had been cut down

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and left bleeding on the roadside in County Cork, in much the same way as Polyneices was left outside the walls of Thebes’ (76–7); ‘I made a connection between the wife traumatized by the death of her husband at the hands of the English soldiery in Carriganimma and the sister driven wild by the edict of a tyrant at Thebes’ (78). Heaney’s version of the tragedy is written in the shadow of the war on terror and in the afterlight of Irish nationalism, recasting the dispute in stark terms: ‘There’s a general order issued / […] The ones we love, it says, / Are enemies of the state. / To be considered traitors’ (5). Antigone in this version, as Tina Chanter argues, is not cast as a monstrous other ‘outside the rule of law, on the nether side of political order’ (2010: 39), but rather seeks to reanimate that which has been obscured by state law, ‘statutes utter and immutable – / Unwritten, original, god-given laws’ (Heaney 2005: 29). Even while she later seems to contradict this assertion in a speech which Goethe wished could be proven to be an inauthentic addition to the text (Goethe 1906: 227. 28 March 1827) – the passage in which she claims, in contravention of her previous insistence on the claim of the Underworld to all the dead, that ‘Not for a husband, not even for a son  /  Would I have broken the law.  /  Another husband I could always find  /  And have other sons […]  /  Where can I find another brother, ever?’ (Heaney 2005: 54) – Chanter argues that her refusal can be understood as a moral defiance of her family curse.14 She refuses to repeat Oedipus’s transgression and ‘generate a child that would also be her brother’ (Chanter 2010: 38) and as such her act is one of ‘knowingly rectifying, purifying, or restoring order in the wake of the disorder created by Oedipus’ (39). We can begin to see the vacillation in Antigone between acts of dissensus and consensus, of rebellion and the inevitable reterritorialization of order. An echo of Deleuze’s discussion of the American and Russian revolutions, explored in Chapter Three, the performance bears witness to that which disrupts the social order, which, in Rancièrian terms, lays claim to something hidden yet immanent to the consensus, only to return as a difference that can be co-opted and territorialized within a hegemonic, but not a priori, system. Like Deleuze, Rancière is drawn to moments of dissensus and politics as that which transgresses fixed forms of life, but such moments are always at risk of being reclaimed by the police order. It is, however, the persistent potentiality for difference and new forms of belonging or identification that mean that a world is at once an assemblage of force and order, and at the same time, the potential for dissent and alternative futures. As such, Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, by gesturing towards the war on terror and the history of Ireland’s struggle against colonization, Chanter argues, stages

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‘the possibility of a different future for those who come after her, a postcolonial, post-racist, anti-repressive, anti-imperialist future’ (2010: 40) – ‘a world in which political protestors against the war on Iraq are not conflated with terrorists, but rather recognized as calling for a future democracy that is yet to come’ (42).15 Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire participates in the project, suggested by Chanter, of ‘a future democracy that is yet to come’ by challenging the British government’s reclassification of citizenship in the wake of the war on terror. In part, she takes up and emphasizes the resonance that Heaney identified between Sophocles’ Antigone and the contemporary political situation – Shamsie’s Polyneices is Parvaiz, a British Muslim who is radicalized and joins Islamic State – while also drawing on her own experience with the UK Home Office as a Pakistan-born resident of Britain applying for citizenship, which she attained in 2013 (cf. O’Driscoll 2017: n.p.; Shamsie 2014: n.p.).16 Transposing classical Thebes into twenty-first-century Britain, Shamsie explores the laws and popular attitudes towards British citizenship from the perspective of a constituent often marginalized by the dominant discourse. As Paul Gilroy has argued, in postimperial Britain the imagined community has been fractured by the decline of empire and the attendant uncertainty over Britain’s superiority, previously evidenced through its expansionist agenda. The racism of imperial Britain has been replaced by a ‘new racism’ fixated on categories of inclusion and exclusion: It specifies who may legitimately belong to the national community and simultaneously advances reasons for segregation or banishment of those whose ‘origin, sentiment or citizenship’ assigns them elsewhere. […] West Indians, for example, are seen as a bastard people occupying an indeterminate space between the Britishness which is their colonial legacy and an amorphous, ahistorical relationship with the dark continent and those parts of the new world where they have been able to reconstitute it. Asians on the other hand […] are understood to be bounded by cultural and biological ties which merit the status of a fully formed, alternative national identity. They pose a threat to the British way of life by virtue of their strength and cohesion. For different reasons, both groups are judged to be incompatible with authentic forms of Englishness. (Gilroy 2002: 45)

Shamsie draws together a cast of British Asians as counterparts to Sophocles’ dramatic figures – the Pasha siblings Aneeka (Antigone), Isma (Ismene) and Parvaiz (Polyneices); Karamat Lone (Creon), a British Asian who has risen through the ranks of his party to become Home Secretary, and his son Eammon (Haemon), who falls in love with Aneeka – to reveal the racial prejudices faced

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by a community which, through the racist discourse of the right-wing press in particular, has been ‘judged to be incompatible with authentic forms of Englishness’. The exclusion of a constituent part of the citizenry on the grounds of race and culture within post-imperial Britain has been exacerbated, the novel suggests, by the contemporary war on terror. As Shamsie notes, the Creon figure of her tale is based not, as some have assumed, on Sadiq Khan (mayor of London and a high-profile British Muslim), but on Theresa May, who as Home Secretary in 2014 advocated a policy to revoke the citizenship of foreignborn British citizens suspected of acts of terrorism and of fighting alongside jihadists (cf. Shamsie 2014: n.p.; Shamsie cited in Felsenthal 2017: n.p.).17 It is this policy, in Home Fire, which forces the crisis of the drama: Parvaiz is killed in Istanbul trying to return home after fighting with ISIS in Syria and the British government, in accordance with the legislation of the Home Secretary, Karamat Lone, refuses to repatriate his body. The novel opens with the eldest sister, Isma, detained at an airport en route to the United States, where she has been accepted on to a PhD programme in sociology at Amherst. As a British-born Muslim of Pakistani descent, this is an eventuality she had prepared for: ‘She’d made sure not to pack anything that would invite comment or questions – no Quran, no family pictures, no books on her areas of academic interest [the war on terror]’ (Shamsie 2017: 3). The Pasha family have more cause than most to suspect that the authorities may be alert to their movements: their father, Adil Pasha, abandoned the family to fight in Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan before being imprisoned in Bagram and, although no official record was made, died during transportation to Guantánamo. However, Isma’s encounter with officers of the UK Border Agency offers no hint that she has been interviewed on the grounds of her family history. Rather, it is the signifiers of her religious and racial identity which set her apart and lead to questions over her dress (the female official does not believe that a designer jacket would belong to her), job (she also falsely assumes that Isma would be an employee not manager of a drycleaners), as well as ‘her thoughts on Shias, homosexuals, the Queen, democracy, the Great British Bake Off, the invasion of Iraq, Israel, suicide bombers, dating websites’ (5). Implicit in each question is an assumed norm of British cultural values (‘the Queen, democracy, the Great British Bake Off ’) or political attitudes deemed to be suspect within the terms of the war of terror, as demonstrated by Isma’s carefully rehearsed responses: ‘“When people talk about the enmity between Shias and Sunni it usually centres around some political imbalance of power,

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such as in Iraq or Syria – as a Brit, I don’t distinguish between one Muslim and another.” “Occupying other people’s territory generally causes more problems than it solves” – this served for both Iraq and Israel’ (5). The question posed to her by the official, ‘Do you considered yourself British?’ (5), is an implicit challenge to the perceived success of British Muslims’ assimilation of assumed British values. Karamat Lone, in his capacity as Home Secretary, exacerbates this hostile environment. On a visit to a Muslim school in Bradford he tells the students: You are, we are, British. Britain accepts this. So do most of you. But for those of you who are in some doubt about it, let me say this: don’t set yourselves apart in the way you dress, the way you think, the outdated codes of behaviour you cling to, the ideologies to which you attach your loyalties. Because if you do, you will be treated differently – not because of racism, though that does still exist, but because you insist on your difference from everyone else in this multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multitudinous United Kingdom of ours. (87–8)

The striking irony here is that of the consensus that Rancière contests, whether it be of the police order or of ethics: Britain is ‘multi-ethnic, multi-religious’, but do not ‘insist on your difference’. To the press, Karamat’s claims bravely address ‘both the anti-migrant attitudes of his own party and the isolationist culture of the community he’d grown up in’ (88). However, in doing so he evokes the language of new racism in which British Asians are deemed ‘a fully formed, alternative national identity’ (Gilroy 2002: 45) and, thus, a constituency held at a distance from the norms that govern the citizenry at large, a part that has no part in the imagined community. Aneeka serves to draw attention to the injustice that excludes and denies full rights to those whose racial or cultural origin mark them as other: as she tells Eammon, ‘among the things this country will let you achieve if you’re Muslim is torture, rendition, detention without trial, airport interrogations, spies in your mosques, teachers reporting your children to the authorities for wanting a world without British injustice’ (Shamsie 2017: 90–1). As Natalie Haynes notes, by making the younger sister, Aneeka, the rebel of her novel, Shamsie follows the Antigone of Jean Anouilh’s adaptation, written during the Nazi occupation of France (Haynes 2017: n.p.). Her rebellion and outrage against ‘British injustice’ is aimed both broadly at the intimidation and marginalization of British Asians in popular culture and at the persecution of her twin brother, Parvaiz, as the state refuses to repatriate his remains. Indeed, the novel offers a sympathetic portrayal of Parvaiz’s radicalization in terms which both suggest the psychological effect of

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growing up without a father and, importantly, associate it with an idealism that seeks ‘a world without British [or, indeed, any other form of] injustice’. Farooq, who grooms Parvaiz on stories of his father and warfare, speaks of Britain and the welfare state: You know this country used to be great. […] When it understood that a welfare state was something that you built up instead of tearing down, when it saw migrants as people to be welcomed, not turned away. […] There is a place like that we can go to now. A place where migrants coming in to join are treated like kings, given more in benefits than the locals […]. A place where skin colour doesn’t matter. Where schools and hospitals are free, and rich and poor have the same facilities. Where men are men. (144)

The persistent sense of masculinity within Farooq’s discourse is undeniable, but Shamsie also recognizes the idealism and gesture towards equality of class and race within this portrait of the Caliphate. As she comments in an interview, she was struck not by the violence of ISIS propaganda but by its attempt to create ‘a sense of belonging’, ‘they were very much trading on people’s sense of isolation and unbelonging’ (Shamsie cited in Felsenthal 2017: n.p.). Belonging, as Aneeka argues, is the antidote to the perceived injustice of state policies which demand assimilation and loyalty from those whose skin colour, relative poverty and religion set them apart. While Parvaiz is seduced by this vision of equality, it can be viewed as a utopianism reminiscent of John Gray’s characterization of contemporary terrorism in Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. As such, the ideals of the novel’s Islamic fundamentalists are akin to those of the 1960s and 1970s revolutionary left: The French Revolution. That was Farooq’s lesson of the day. […] Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – who could argue against that? […] But where would those ideals be without the Reign of Terror that nurtured and protected them with blood, eliminating all enemies, internal and external, that threatened the new Utopia […]. Eventually the terror ends, having served its purpose of protecting a new – a revolutionary – state of affairs that is besieged by enemies who are terrified of its moral power. (147)

The ‘new Utopia’ is the world without conflict that Gray argues is the aim of all teleological, modern ideologies, making radical Islam an inheritor of Positivism, Marxism, Nazism and neo-conservatism alike, and in the pursuit of ‘the Enlightenment ideal of a world without conflict’ tens of millions have been ‘killed or enslaved’ (Gray 2003: 2).18 From Rancière’s point of view, the actions

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of Farooq and Parvaiz in the struggle to realize this aim cannot be regarded as political action but, ultimately, as the creation of another consensus: supplanting one police order with an alternative one. And, crucially, it proposes a new consensus that aims to reduce the possibilities for dissensus by imagining a world without conflict, without difference. Equality, as I have argued above, is for Rancière not the erasure of difference but the staging of an act that reveals the anarchy of every police order (the absent foundation or arkhê that belies any hierarchy) and, as such, invalidates the prohibition which demarcates who counts as fully human, who is capable of intelligible speech and whose actions are registered as meaningful. As Wallerstein has also argued, central tenets of liberal democracy, such as the welfare state, are mistaken as signs of equality: post-war Keynesian economics may well have raised living standards, life expectancy and prosperity across Europe compared to the previous century, but the same structural inequality between rich and poor is continually reproduced and as a result ‘the world seem[s] still basically unjust and unequal in the view of the majority of the world’s population’ (Wallerstein 2002: 13). Parvaiz’s perception of the failure of the British welfare state to create the equal society that he holds as his ideal, then, is of a piece with the failure of the post-war consensus. And, of course, for Rancière the problem is precisely that it remains a consensus. In Shamsie’s novel, by contrast, the actions of Aneeka constitute a dissensus insofar as she seeks to challenge the ban that disentitles Parvaiz to British citizenship. It is a novel, as reviewers have noted, that draws attention to the importance of listening to what is otherwise ignored: it is ‘about hearing and being heard’ (Chambers 2017: n.p.), as exemplified by both Eammon, who, as Preti Tanja notes, ‘has excellent hearing’ (2017: n.p.), and Parvaiz, who creates an archive of sound recordings.19 Recognizing Parvaiz’s actions as more than those of a terrorist who falls outside the law of the state is Aneeka’s demand, and it is one that Shamsie views within the context of a sociopolitical environment in which the threat of exclusion extends to all citizens. As she reflects on her own application for UK citizenship, she recalls that I was soon to discover that even citizenship itself isn’t enough to create that feeling of security – a few weeks after I become [sic] a citizen, May called for powers to strip Britons of citizenship in particular circumstances, if they are born outside the UK. Anyone who thinks that, if this comes to pass, the category of ‘particular circumstances’ won’t ever be broadened to fit the prevailing mood or score political points simply hasn’t been paying attention to the rhetoric that separates ‘the British’ from ‘British passport-holders’. (Shamsie 2014: n.p.)

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It is the threat posed by ‘the category of “particular circumstances”’ that is exposed in the novel, as what begins as a revocation of the rights of citizens who hold a dual passport is proposed, at the bidding of Karamat Lone, to be extended to all: ‘his intention to expand the Home Secretary’s power to revoke British citizenship so that it applied to British-born single passport-holders. It was, clearly, the sensible fulfilment of a law that was so far only half made. You had to determine someone’s fitness for citizenship based on their actions, not on accidents of birth’ (Shamsie 2017: 214). Karamat’s policy is more extreme than that discussed by Shamsie above: posed as the logical end of a ‘half made’ law which punishes only those with dual passports, it exposes the illusion upon which the state is founded, revealing that there is no essential, a priori birth right, only one’s actions. As a law student, Aneeka is particularly aware of matters of legality and her actions in the novel are an express contestation of the legitimacy of a government which tells its Muslim constituents to assimilate British norms and obscure their difference. When she learns that her brother’s remains have been taken to Pakistan, the nation of his kin but not his birth, Aneeka, like Antigone before her, stages a protest. The dust storm that both briefly obscures and undoes Antigone’s burial of her brother in Sophocles’ play – ‘A whirlwind. Out of nowhere. / […] Flying sand and dust. / […] But then it clears / And this one’s standing, crying her eyes out. / She see the bare corpse and lets out a screech’ (Heaney 2005: 28) – is, in Home Fire, an active participant in the scene in which Aneeka stages her protest, the media looking on: For a few moments there was only a howling noise, the wind raging through the park, and then a hand plucked away the white cloth and the howl was the girl, a dust mask on her face […]. A howl deeper than a girl, a howl that came out of the earth and through her […]. In the whole apocalyptic mess of the park the only thing that remained unburied was the face of the dead boy. (Shamsie 2014: 224)

Rather than signifying a ‘plague’ (Heaney 2005: 28) sent by the gods, as it is in Sophocles’ play, the wind is disassociated from any metaphysical intent and becomes an actor on its own terms. It forms part of an assemblage – girl, earth, howl, wind – that demands that Parvaiz’s corpse be seen as a figure of attachment and of love, rather than one obscured by the rhetoric of otherness attributed to the body of the terrorist. However, while her actions combined with the elemental forces that participate in this spectacle carry a particularly affective force, causing the Home Secretary to admit that it was ‘impressive’

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(Shamsie 2014: 224), when she turns to the camera and addresses him directly she is almost immediately defeated, dismissed ‘after all the noise and spectacle, [as] just a silly girl’ (225): But then the girl had opened her mouth. ‘Heads impaled on spikes. Bodies thrown into unmarked graves. There are people who follow these practices. Her brother left Britain to join them.’ The PM rose above party politics, the Leader of the Opposition rose to join him. There were ‘hear, hears’ on either sides of the aisle. The Home Secretary was lauded for the difficult decisions he had to make and the personal trials he’d undergone that had in no way affected his judgement or commitment to doing the right thing. (225–6)

For Judith Butler, when Sophocles’ Antigone speaks she challenges gender norms by demonstrating her capacity to use the masculine language of law and justice. Aneeka makes a similar claim by stating that it is only ‘in the stories of wicked tyrants [that] men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families – their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves. All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice. I am here to ask for justice’ (224–5). Her act of dissensus here is one that, once more, reveals the illusion or lie that the legal system and social hierarchy that it supports is based on anything more than tacit consent and participation. It contests the divisions that distinguish citizen from terrorist, and to that extent, as Chanter claimed of Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, stages ‘the possibility of a different future for those who come after her, a postcolonial, post-racist, anti-repressive, anti-imperialist future’ (2010: 40) – ‘a world in which political protestors against the war on Iraq are not conflated with terrorists, but rather recognized as calling for a future democracy that is yet to come’ (42). Aneeka’s act of love towards her brother is a glimpse of a possible world in which an equality of difference rather than assimilation is encouraged and in which the polarizing rhetoric of the war of terror – you’re either with us or with the terrorists – is overcome. To recall Howard Caygill (2015), discussed in Chapter Three, such is a politics aimed at the future, one in which active forces rather than a reactive, oppositional mindset prevails. There are hints in the novel that Aneeka’s spectacle has shifted perceptions about who should be considered traitors or enemies of the state – Pakistan’s High Commissioner comments that the image of her in the dust storm has been registered ‘in the nation’s consciousness’ (228) as a symbol of resistance,

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while Karamat’s wife Terry, who can be regarded as the Tiresias figure in the novel, although her words often echo those attributed to Haemon in Antigone, raises a note of caution in telling her husband that ‘a government that sends its citizens to some other country when they act in ways we don’t like. […] And stopping a family from burying its own – that never looks good. That’s what people are beginning to say around me’ (217–18).20 However, Shamsie’s Aneeka does not gain the sympathy ultimately afforded to Antigone by the chorus in Sophocles’ drama. As reviewers have noted, the role of the chorus in Home Fire is assumed by the tabloid press, whose vitriol against the Pasha twins persists: ‘IS THIS THE FACE OF EVIL? a tabloid asked, illustrating the question with a picture of the girl howling as dust flew around her. Slag, terrorist-spawn, enemyof-Britain. Those were the words being used to describe her, the paper reported, placing inverted commas around the words as proof ’ (229). Their judgement reveals the ways in which the prohibition that demarcates citizen and terrorist is created and maintained through popular rhetoric. Moreover, it returns us to the issue of Aneeka’s words noted above. If, as Butler argues, Antigone can be read as transgressing gender norms by laying claim to masculine language, the manipulation of Aneeka’s speech and act by the Home Secretary and tabloid press reveal the fragility of any act of dissensus. Shamsie presents a twentyfirst-century Britain enthralled to the language of new racism, so much so that the mere suggestion that Karamat Lone has acted under ‘personal animus’ (245) in this case is seized upon as evidence that he is not fit for the job: by the hostile reaction in the media and online it is implied that he, like all those other unassimilated British Asians, ‘bound by cultural and biological ties which merit the status of a fully formed, alternative national identity’ (Gilroy 2002: 45), is unable to put personal affiliations aside and participate fully in the state. Eammon, as he is in Sophocles’ play, is the voice of reason, asking in a film released on social media before he travels to Karachi to be reunited with Aneeka ‘is Britain really a nation that turns people into figures of hate because they love unconditionally?’ (245). Whereas in Antigone, Haemon’s words cause the chorus to begin to rethink their initial support for Creon’s decree – ‘You should take good note, Creon, of Haemon’s words / And he of yours. Both of you say sound things’ (Heaney 2005: 44) – Home Fire registers no critical reflection from its ‘chorus’. Rather, the media stands by and watches as Eammon is greeted on his arrival in the park in Karachi where Aneeka holds a vigil over her brother’s corpse by two men, most likely associates of Islamic State, who tie an explosive device around his waist. Shamsie’s novel is as much a tragedy as the original drama, ending on

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the moment before the anticipated detonation and as the two lovers embrace. As with Antigone, doubt remains over the alternative posed by the heroine – Antigone’s steadfast adherence to the unwritten laws of the gods, Aneeka’s petition for justice. As Rancière’s comments on Antigone suggest, as appeals to universal notions of kinship and justice these claims seek to counter state legislation with an ethical law that opposes a universal category of the human with an equally abstract and universal other. Ethics, by this account, emerges through the state of exception, as the staging of ‘an inclusive exclusion’ of the man who ‘separates and opposes himself ’ (Agamben 1998: 8). This is an act of consensus, a reduction of difference in the service of a universal norm or universal state of exception. For this reason, Rancière views Antigone as bearer of a trauma ‘without beginning or end’ (2006a: 5): no dissensus can be staged since it relies on the contestation of two generalizable terms without the necessary intervention of the specific. The tension that Judith Butler posits between legitimacy and illegitimacy, citizen and non-citizen could provide the basis for dissensus and thus provide the opportunity for ‘a new field of the human’ (2000: 82). Antigone/Aneeka’s speech is one site in which this is momentarily held out as a possibility: for Butler, Antigone operates ‘in the chiasm within the vocabulary of political norms’ (82), between intelligibility and animal noise, legality and a ‘law beyond law, beyond conceptualization’ (33); in Home Fire, Aneeka’s howl, which merges with the wind and earth, gestures towards this ‘beyond’ even while it is made to signify within the rhetoric of the popular media. In Rancière’s terms, in this moment we are not witness to the unrepresentable or absolutely other (how could we?), but the arbitrariness of the divisions which order the sensible, which determine what is registered as meaningful action. To do so, Antigone/Aneeka must indeed act ‘in the chiasm within the vocabulary of political norms’, between citizen and terrorist, human and non-human. However, when she does so in the name of justice she repeats the sentiments of her brother before her who sought greater equality in the Caliphate. Justice and equality in the liberal-democratic sense signify an inclusive exclusion: concepts which depend upon the creation of a consensus, supposedly inclusive of all, even while they stipulate the terms by which some constituent parts can be said to have no part. Aneeka’s dissensus, then, is an act of disrupting the consensus upon which the war on terror has delineated loyal citizen and terrorist threat. In the racial politics of multicultural Britain that she provokes by refusing to assimilate in her clothing and appearance, she also challenges normative views of national belonging. In that respect, her act of grieving is an echo of Heaney’s Irish widow, Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, who laments the murder of her husband

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at the hands of English soldiers. As noted previously, this can be read as an act of memorialization, as resistance to a dominant discourse of a history which erases the names and lives of the victims of state oppression. Similarly, Shamsie’s sympathetic portrayal of Parvaiz suggests that the lives and deaths of those whose actions have put them on the side of the enemy (in the language of President Bush) cannot be so easily dismissed as evil, pure and simple. The prohibition which determines who is a citizen and who is not is easily manipulated, the novel suggests, and in a world in which immigrants are demonized and racial others accused of not assimilating to British values we should be wary of the consensus view. Language, as we have seen, can be complicit in the creation of normative values and the binary divisions upon which intolerance thrives. At the same time, however, this remains a novel concerned with listening to that which is otherwise silenced or dismissed as mere noise (Ankeeka’s howl, the sound recordings of Parvaiz). Both can be employed in the service of totalitarian aims (by the right-wing press or the propaganda of ISIS), but as Butler suggests it is the act of naming and commemorating itself, of ‘hearing beyond what we are able to hear’, that is a defiance that ‘decenters us from our supremacy’ (2006: 18). What we have uncovered through Rancière’s work and the debate inspired by Antigone and beyond (in this case, in Shamsie’s Home Fire) is the persistent risk that any act of dissensus can be co-opted to the service of consensus, of deterritorializations that become territorializations. This has been a constant throughout the philosophical arguments explored in this book: as Nietzsche surmises ‘Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo finally speaks the language of Dionysus’ (2003: 104). For this reason, world literature is always potentially a rhetoric of innocence, an instrument for the creation of consent, but also, equally it holds the possibilities for dissent. Moreover, by maintaining the potential that every literary text is, to varying degrees, majoritarian and minoritarian, a portrayal of a recognizable society and expressive of a people yet-to-come, an instrument of consent and of dissent, we intimate the equality of all actors within the literary world without for one moment denying the inequalities created by the structures that dominate it.

Literary dissensus: Reconsidering Rancière and Deleuze As we have seen, Rancière’s philosophy explores the overlapping functions of politics and literature as two forms of dissensus, each serving to redistribute and reframe the ‘sensible’ in new, unforeseen ways: ‘Making what was unseen

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visible; [and] making what was audible as mere noise heard as speech’ (Rancière 2010: 38). Both processes, therefore, consist ‘in re-figuring space, that is in what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it’ (37), and as such the articulation of that which was previously excluded, invisible or other is characterized as a moment of dissensus, of politics itself. It is in this respect that Rancière’s thought departs from a Marxist conception of politics that begins with a preconstituted subject who will assume their proper place once the current system of exploitation is overcome. Similarly, he stands opposed to critics such as Chris Bongie who is expressly critical of postcolonial writing that eschews the ‘properly political’ (2008: 1) articulation of situated opposition and nationalism, since, for Rancière, the political subject, the people, ‘exists only as a rupture with the logic of arkhê’ and ‘can be identified neither with the race of those who recognize each other as having the same beginning or birth, nor with a part or sum of the parts, of the population’ (Rancière 2010: 33). As Shamsie’s contemporary Antigone reveals, it is not merely the fictitious nature of the arkhê that should be the cause of our concern, but the ways in which it can be co-opted into the service of the police order and recategorize marginalized groups within the body of the collective as enemies of the state, as citizens of nowhere. Within the broader philosophical account of dissent developed throughout this study, Rancière’s identification of moments of rupture and the transformation of the status quo by means of the emergence of hitherto silenced or hidden actors would seem to map broadly onto the processes of deterritorialization, becoming and fabulation that Deleuze outlines in his own work. Where Deleuze links the task of literature to the invention of a people who are missing, Rancière ascribes to the aesthetic dimension of politics a transformative process of the demos’s becoming-actual. As Gabriel Rockhill explains, in Rancière, ‘those who have no name, who remain invisible and inaudible, can only penetrate the police order via a mode of subjectivization that transforms the aesthetic coordinates of the community by implementing the universal presupposition of politics: we are all equal’ (2013: xiv). Rancière therefore reframes the possibility of equality or democracy, and thus of politics as he defines it, in terms of an aesthetic redistribution of the sensible, ‘the cluster of perceptions and practices that shape this common world’ (Rancière 2010: 152). In turn, ‘the politics of literature thus means that literature as literature is involved in this partition of the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world’ (152). This focus on the productive effects of the text in itself not only suggests the way in

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which Rancière’s philosophy might be aligned with Rita Felski’s post-critical turn, but signals what he shares with his contemporaries, Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze, as philosophers of immanence and relation. Together, these three philosophers offer an aesthetics of relation that, when viewed in light of the future-orientated, postcolonial project of paving the way for a people yetto-come, a people no longer dominated by reactive forces, unites the worldbuilding task of the literary text as an actor or assemblage (the ‘fram[ing] of a polemical common world’) with an always-renewed possibility for dissent. As Shamsie’s novel suggests, such work is always at risk of reterritorialization within the logic of the police order, within a rhetoric of consent, but that does not limit the text’s potential for future deterritorializations or dissensus. Rancière maintains that this is the specific work of literature as such, but at the same time he resists the notion of two separate spheres of the literary and the political, to recall Felski. While the two fields of literature and politics are irreducible, there is, for Rancière, ‘a specific link between politics as a definite way of doing and literature as a definite practice of writing’ (2010: 152). In order to understand more precisely how he conceives of this relation we need first to take into consideration Rancière’s philosophy of aesthetics, which, in turn, will lead us both to his dispute with Deleuze and, I argue, its resolution. Above we encountered Rancière’s account of political dissensus and, through Shamsie, a literary enactment of that process of making visible and heard that which the police order excludes. However, to this account of political dissensus he adds a history of aesthetics that makes a parallel distinction between ancient and contemporary philosophies. In his aesthetic theory, Rancière marks a discrepancy between a representative regime grounded in Aristotelian models of genre, plot and the principle of mimesis, and an aesthetic regime, which is properly speaking the point of dissensus. The representative regime dictates the forms and subjects appropriate to art: artworks are ‘not so much copies of reality as ways of imposing a form on matter. As such, they are subject to a set of intrinsic norms: a hierarchy of genres, adequation between expression and subject matter, correspondence between the arts, etc’ (Rancière 2010: 15). In Nietzschean terms, to recall Chapter Two, the representative regime is firmly the reign of Apolline arts, concerned not so much with the perfect imitation of reality but certainly not the formless anarchy of Dionysus. However, the aesthetic regime confronts us with a paradox that is art’s capacity to intervene and resist ‘the very same order that defines its “consistency”’ (170), in other words, that defines it as art. The aesthetic regime creates dissensus by means of a contestation of the gap that

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separates art from non-art but not simply in order to resolve the distinction. Where the representative regime of art establishes the ‘primacy of action over characters’, a ‘hierarchy of genres according to the dignity of their subject matter’ and does so on the basis of ‘an analogy with a fully hierarchical vision of the community’ (Rancière 2013: 17), the aesthetic regime ‘strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres’ (18–19). Dissensus, then, is much more than the repudiation of the Aristotelian hierarchy of representation: The unique power of literature finds its source in that zone of indeterminacy where former individuations are undone, where the eternal dance of atoms composes new figures and intensities every moment. The old power of representation stemmed from the capacity of the organized mind to animate a formless external material. The new power of literature takes hold, on the other hand, just where the mind becomes disorganized, where its world splits. (Rancière 2006b: 149)

The aesthetic regime opens up a dissensus within the hierarchical and structured ordering of the sensible because it witnesses a split which both distinguishes between and collides organization and disorganization, thought and nonthought, and art and non-art. This is key to understanding Rancière’s democratic vision of art, since, as Peter Hallward explains, if democracy is concerned ‘not with the formulation of agreement or the preservation of order but with the invention of new and hitherto unauthorized modes of disaggregation, disagreement and disorder’, then the aesthetic regime continually institutes a democratic movement insofar as ‘genuine art is what indistinguishes, in newly creative ways and with the resources peculiar to a specific artistic practice, art and that which figures as other than art’ (2005: 35). The equality particular to art and literature, in other words, lies not in an ethical consensus concerning the universalism of certain forms of representation, for example, but in the ubiquity of a tension between contraries in a ‘zone of indeterminacy’. Indeed, we might add that the equality of art lies in the ubiquity of art’s resistance, since art and literature by this account is both the deterritorialization of formerly secure forms of individuation and the framing of the shifting boundary between territorialization and deterritorialization, art and its other. Rancière makes a deliberate gesture towards Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in his reference to individuation in the quotation above. The tension between Apollo and Dionysus in art for Nietzsche finds its complement in Rancière’s portrayal of

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a political sphere that distinguishes between the citizen and an excess identified as the demos, as well as in his aesthetic theory. As noted above, Apolline art is the creation of consensus and is party to the representational regime: ‘Apollo emblematizes the moment when the union of thought and the unthought become fixed in a harmonious figure. […] Dionysus is the figure of the dark background which resists thought […]. Art’s “resistance” is in fact the tension of contraries, the interminable tension between Apollo and Dionysus’ (Rancière 2010: 175). Art and literature’s resistance is the moment in which Dionysian anarchy disrupts the order of Apollo, the god of civilization, form and individuation – the god who ‘seeks to pacify individuals by drawing boundaries between them’ (Nietzsche 2003: 50). As discussed in Chapter Two, this Nietzschean view of art is not aimed at the resolution of the dualism between Apollo and Dionysus, but rather holds them as forces in contention: the power of individuation and form gives way to the ‘Dionsyaic impulse [that] then devours this whole world of phenomena’ (106), only to return to us in ‘the language of Apollo’ (104). The Birth of Tragedy describes not a process of dialectical sublation but a continually shifting balance between Dionysus and Apollo. It is this dualism that Rancière preserves in his own aesthetic theory and which, for him, is the political promise of art: ‘Aesthetic experience is that of an unprecedented sensorium in which the hierarchies are abolished that structured sensory experience. That is why it bears within it the promise of a “new art of living” of individuals and the community, the promise of a new humanity’ (Rancière 2010: 176). This is where Rancière takes issue with Deleuze. What Rancière designates the ‘promise’ of art ‘is marked by the paradox of “artistic” resistance. Art promises a people in two contradictory ways: it does so insofar as it is art and insofar as it is not art’ (177). In part, this is his refusal of separate spheres: art as dissensus is a rearrangement of the sensible which frames a political community in terms of who counts as citizens or indeed as human beings and who does not as much as it classifies what counts as art and what does not. But as was seen previously, this always risks returning a new form of the police order. Thus, ‘to prevent the resistance of art fading into its contrary [representation, the police] it must be upheld as the unresolved tension between two resistances’ (183), the resistance of art and the resistance of non-art or politics. The ‘promise’ then is a utopian one, an always deferred process of becoming in which Apolline individuation is undone by the anarchy of Dionysus only to return in the guise of Apollo. As both Raji Vallury (2009: 237) and Michael Jonik (2011) have argued, Deleuzians will no doubt recognize the dualism that serves as the ground of art’s revolutionary power. However, it

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is here that Rancière introduces a fundamental critique of Deleuze’s approach to literature and politics, since his work, Rancière argues, seeks to resolve this cycle of contraries and thus makes the Platonic error of reintroducing transcendence into a philosophy of immanence: Deleuze strived for a literature that would ‘produce not simply the promise of a people but its reality, a new way of “peopling the earth”’ (2010: 179).21 The core of Rancière’s critique of his contemporary lies in his reading of Deleuze’s essay ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’. As an account of minor literature and its revolutionary capacity to dissemble fixed form and push language towards its outside in an act of deterritorialization, this essay, Rancière argues, ultimately seeks to resolve the tension between actual and virtual, form and formlessness, Apollo and Dionysus: Deleuze, for his part, refuses to accept that, in the last instance, metaphor can be the truth of its truth. He wants it to be a real metamorphosis: literature must produce not a metaphor but a metamorphosis […]. Achab [sic] must be the witness of ‘primary nature’ and Bartleby must be a Christ, the mediator between two radically separate orders. For this, the artist himself must have passed over to ‘the other side’, must have lived through something that is too strong, unbreathable, an experience of primary nature, of the inhuman nature from which he returns with ‘reddened eyes’, an experience that leaves its marks on his flesh. Only then is it possible to go beyond the Kantian as if, the Proustian metaphor or the Adornian contradiction. But it remains to be seen what the price is to pay for that excess. The price to pay is literally the reintroduction of a kind of transcendence in the thought of immanence. (180)

While Deleuze privileges metamorphoses such as Bartleby’s becomingimperceptible or Ahab’s becoming-whale, ostensibly leading us into a zone of indeterminacy or deterritorialization, he ultimately fails to maintain ‘the purity of distinction that contrasts the formula to the story’ (2006b: 153). He celebrates the destructive effects of a minor language, but can do so only through the transcription of words: Gregor’s squeaking in Metamorphosis or Isabel’s murmur in Pierre, or, The Ambiguities ‘creates no other language in language’ (154). Similarly, despite his rejection of representation and metaphor, Deleuze returns us to the classical Aristotelian categories of story, character and action: ‘He descants on the virtue of molecular multiplicities and haecceities, of nonpersonal forms of individuation. He goes on about the individuality of an hour that dreams, or a landscape that sees. But his analyses always come to center on the “hero” of a story’ (154) – Ahab or Bartleby are the exemplary characters or operators of becoming.

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If Deleuze provides us with a way to think about the protagonist, author or ideology in terms of a process with the potential to open up a line of flight that escapes the dominant order, then Rancière’s critique challenges certain assumptions about the politics of literature. At issue is not the application of Aristotelian categories as such but the assumption made by Deleuze, according to Rancière, that equality is derived from the ontological primacy of nonpreference, imperceptibility or primary nature. To privilege the virtual is to reinstate transcendence at the heart of immanence and, ultimately, to resolve the distinction between art and life upon which Rancière’s philosophy of aesthetics and politics is grounded. Yet, as Michael Jonik has argued, the transcendental empiricism that Deleuze advocates might offer a way to rethink this impasse (2011: 40).22 Rather than returning us to transcendence per se, transcendental empiricism offers a focus on experience, analysing various objects encountered and exploring how states of affairs come to be what they are (becoming not being). Rather than starting with ‘abstractions such as the One, the Whole, the Subject’ and then searching for ‘the process by which they are embodied in a world which they make conform to their requirements’, Deleuze explores ‘the states of things, in such a way that non-preexistent concepts can be extracted from them’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: vi). In other words, it is within immanence that the processes of de/reterritorialization may be extracted. Similarly, if Deleuze rejects mimesis in order to argue that ‘Ahab does not imitate the whale, he becomes Moby-Dick’, he describes not a metamorphosis as such, but the entrance ‘into the zone of proximity where he can no longer be distinguished from MobyDick’ (Deleuze 1997: 78): a flight towards a shared plane of immanence that is common to both figures. Deleuze’s analyses of literature produce lines of deterritorialization within immanence as the potential becoming-minor of actual forms. Crucially then, as Jonik argues, ‘the original becomes less the hero of the confrontation of the two orders, as the fading sign of the human where it becomes indiscernible from the inhuman world’ (2011: 40). As we have seen throughout this study and specifically in relation to Deleuze as much as in Rancière, the literary text enacts processes of deterritorialization but not in order to resolve the tension or dualism of the virtual/actual divide. There is no ontological basis to suppose that the fraternal New World community will take precedence over the Law of the Father (cf. Rancière 2006b: 158); we cannot, Latour reminds us, prescribe in advance the nature or form that a force will take (cf. Latour 1993b: 7). Rather, literature, and indeed the politics of literature, marks the potential becoming-minor of a people yet-to-come. It is precisely, this

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sense of deferred becoming that Rancière’s analysis of Deleuze and, specifically, ‘Bartleby’ elides. Deleuze’s return to the hero of the work gives power to the figure of the eccentric or witness who is ‘strictly identical with the power of the writer’, Rancière argues (2006b: 156). However, for Deleuze, as we saw in Chapter Two, literature is health because it incorporates both the actual event or form and its virtual potential to become new. In Melville he finds the paternal function and potential for a ‘society of brothers’ (Deleuze 1997: 84), but crucially this is a society yet-to-come, an attempt to transform the world that is threatened with failure and the return of the father. Thus, far from assuming unequivocally the priority of a fraternal community, Deleuze demonstrates the ongoing tension between contraries by which the singular power of ‘a brother’ is threatened with the return of the father (88), and, conversely, the majoritarian forces of nationalism and paternal function of the Law are subject to deterritorialization: ‘For even in the midst of its failure, the American Revolution continues to send out its fragments, always making something take flight on the horizon […], always trying to break through the wall, to take up the experiment once again, to find a brotherhood in this enterprise, a sister in this becoming, a music in its stuttering language’ (89). It is this preservation of the tension between the singular and the specific that continually confronts literature with its other without resolving the two. This holds for Deleuze’s classification of Melville’s characters, which Rancière misrepresents in the quote above by claiming that Ahab and Bartleby may be identified as both the heroes of the analysis and aligned with the function of the author. In Deleuze, the author is identified not as a being of primary nature akin to Ahab or Bartleby but more precisely as a witness – a being of secondary nature, such as Ishmael, Captain Vere and the attorney, who is able to recognize the devastation wrought by originals: Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Captain Vere in Billy Budd, and the attorney in Bartleby all have this power to ‘See’: they are capable of grasping and understanding, as much as is possible, the beings of Primary Nature [...]. Though they are able to see into the Primary Nature that so fascinates them, they are nonetheless representatives of secondary nature and its laws. They bear the parental image – they seem like good fathers, benevolent fathers (or at least protective big brothers [...]). Torn between the two Natures, with all their contradictions, these characters [...] are Witnesses, narrators, interpreters. (80–1)

The distinction that Rancière obscures is one that Deleuze draws between the eccentric figures of primary nature and the prophet, whose role is to bear witness

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to the effects of originals as well as the light they throw on the world. In other words, like the author, the prophet’s role is to intuit the play of a singular life (the originals and the events that exceed the logic of representation, that cannot be located on the plane of organization), within a milieu of particular lives: to grasp ‘the innermost depths of life and death without leading us back to reason. The novelist has the eye of a prophet, not the gaze of a psychologist’ (82). This enables the writer-as-witness to formulate a symptomatology of their milieu, creating a new understanding of particular forms of life. At the same time, because they also sense, as much as is possible, something of the singular life that originals express, theirs is a narrative that contains the virtual potential to become. A life means the potential for life (and for different ways of life) in any context: life as becoming, not being. Therefore, at once, the author/character as physician/ prophet both creates new diagnoses from the particular lives that populate their milieu and intuits something of the virtual potential of a life as the power to become: literature as ‘health’. As we have seen already in this chapter, this potentiality is a sign both of literature’s capacity to enact a dissensus or dissent and to stage a demonstration of equality that holds not only in the context of art but also of politics. Rancière and Deleuze have been revealed as complimentary philosophers alongside the work of Latour and Glissant, and together each have contributed to this study’s argument for a reimagined postcolonial and world literary practice that views the text as an assemblage which creates the potential for new forms of solidarity, cooperation and belonging. Together, these thinkers offer an alternative to the transcendent and a priori structures which underpin prominent theories of world literature, such as those of Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, and propose an alternative to the postcolonial fixation on difference. Opacity and equality, however, are not a rejection of the role of a radical otherness or virtuality. Rather, these terms signal a shift away from difference understood as a measure of distance relative to a norm. The persistence of a Dionysian excess, virtuality or otherness is the always-renewed capacity of art and literature to resist and create the potential for new ways of living, ‘a new humanity’ (Rancière 2010: 176). As we have seen, crucial to resolving the dispute between Rancière and Deleuze is a precise understanding of the role of witnessing: the writer or reader who is sensitive to moments of deterritorialization and disruption within this actual world, as well as to their reterritorialization in forms of consent. The writer, then, is always witness to ‘the promise of a new humanity’ (176) and not its actuality; they are both an observer of this actual world and a prophet of its renewal. In the last section of

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this chapter, I will conclude Postcolonialism After World Literature with one final example of a literary text which offers a symptomology of a world threatened by reactive forces: Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation. Like Shamsie’s Home Fire, it focuses on processes of exclusion within the context of a nation-state tested by the increasing power of dogmatic forms of religious faith, in this case postcolonial Algeria. While Shamsie rewrites Antigone as a dissensus in relation to the contemporary British state, Daoud rewrites Albert Camus’s The Outsider in order to give voice to the Arab rendered silent by Camus’s novel. Daoud and Shamsie both offer symptomatologies of the contemporary, globalized world in an age of terror and in doing so they stage the equality of those lives obscured or dismissed as unintelligible by the dominant hierarchy. The Meursault Investigation, in particular, reveals the failings of anticolonial revolution (the return of the father in the form of the religious state) via its own two prophets: Musa, the Arab murdered in Camus’s The Outsider, and his brother, the novel’s narrator, Harun.23 The biblical resonance of these two characters (the prophets Moses and Aaron, respectively) will be revealed in the remainder of this chapter to be central to the novel’s literary act of dissensus, a staging of the irresolvable forces of deterritorialization and territorialization, of consensus or consent and postcolonial literature’s promise of new forms of alliance and belonging in a world no longer dominated by reactive, imperialist forces.

Prophecies of the outsider: Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation Dubbed a ‘remake’ (Brozgal 2016; Kaplan 2016), ‘riff ’ (Kaplan 2016), ‘subversive retelling’ (Moaveni 2015), and even a ‘rebuke’ (Zerofsky 2015) of Albert Camus’s 1952 novel The Outsider, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation took to the stage of world literature in a move familiar to postcolonial criticism: writing back to the colonial canon. In this case, writing back to an author – Albert Camus – identified by Edward Said as undoubtedly of ‘world status’ (1993: 208), but whose writings were ‘informed by an extraordinarily belated, in some ways incapacitated colonial sensibility’, emerging, when read contrapuntally, as complicit with ‘an imperial gesture’ (213). Born to a working-class, pied-noir family in French Algeria, Camus occupied a precarious position in the colony: certainly not within the ranks of the colonized, he nonetheless grew up in poverty in a slum district of Algiers. Daoud’s novel emphasizes aspects of Camus’s own life via the protagonist, Harun: both are second sons (this explains the reversal

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of seniority between Musa and Harun in Daoud’s novel by comparison with the biblical account of Moses and Aaron); both experience the loss of their fathers in early childhood; and Harun’s mother, like that of Camus, is described as illiterate and finds work as a cleaner. The Meursault Investigation thus establishes parallels between the fictional Harun and the author of the novel that both shapes his story and Daoud’s text itself. However, Camus’s position within the history of postcolonial and Algerian literature has always been an ambivalent, contested one. In his journalistic prose, Camus was one of the first pied-noirs to criticize the French state, to address the poverty of the colonized indigenous population and to highlight social injustice and colonial violence, such as the 1945 Sétif massacre (cf. van der Poel 2007; Forsdick 2007). In the interwar period, as a journalist, Camus sought to expose the social injustices of the colonial administration, producing exposés of the poverty in Kabylia and arguing for reform to the economic structure of the state. For Camus, social justice in Algeria demanded, as Crowley contends, ‘a true popular democracy, with a collectivist economy’ (2007: 96), a world economic federation to oversee the equal distribution of capital. It was, however, his opposition to Algerian nationalism and refusal to imagine an Algeria apart from French rule that caused many to view him, in the words of Edward Hughes, as ‘an exemplary incarnation of the colonial mindset’ (2007: 6). Camus maintained a paternalistic view that refused to accept the possibility of an independent Algeria. He was, as Albert Memmi wrote in 1957, a ‘coloniser of good will’ (cited by Forsdick 2007: 127), a position which is, as The Colonizer and the Colonized makes clear, effectively untenable: ‘Having discovered the economic, political and moral scandal of colonization, he can no longer agree to become what his fellow citizens have become’ (Memmi 2003: 63).24 There can be the colonizer who accepts his position of mastery (and selfdehumanization) and there can be the colonizer who refuses, openly criticizing and protesting against the colonial authorities. Yet the latter position is nothing other than a continuation of the colonial order unless he openly rejects what he is (a colonizer) – ‘Refusing the colonizers, damned by them: let him adopt the colonized people and be adopted by them: let him become a turncoat’ (66). To do so would be an example of ‘extreme good will’ (66) that, in practice, will falter in the face of the necessary stage of nationalism in the struggle for colonial liberation, since it will be the liberation of a nation from which he is distanced.25 Camus’s status within the colony puts him in a contradictory position: seeking to highlight social injustice and colonial violence, but unable to reject the fundamental structure of colonialism. In short, while his journalistic prose evinces the proliferation of inequality in colonial Algeria, Camus did not follow

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the more radical path and imagine the equality of all Algerian citizens beyond the relation of colonizer and colonized. The most troubling aspect of Camus’s work for postcolonial critics, such as Edward Said, has been the portrayal and fate of his Arab characters, sometimes unnamed and often ‘without a history’ (Said 1993: 212). For Said, Camus was exemplary of an imperialist mindset insofar as, in works such as The Outsider and The Plague, his two novels set in Algeria, the fiction denied agency and individuality to the Arab characters and landscape. It is not only that the murdered Arab in The Outsider is unnamed, but also that his death is nothing other than a screen for the projection of the French character’s existential crisis (cf. Said 1993: 219; Camus 2010). Similarly, the Algerian landscape is not presented as the site of historical struggles specific to that location but as a backdrop for narratives which reflect the troubles of Nazi France (cf. Said 1993: 211). As Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, Minister of Education in post-independence Algeria, claimed in a lecture delivered in 1967, ‘in killing the Arab Camus achieves, subconsciously, the dream of the pied-noir who loves Algeria but can only conceive of an Algeria without Algerians’ (cited in Hargreaves 1992: 102). Nonetheless, in recent years Algerian writers have sought to recuperate Camus’s legacy. Assia Djebar in Algerian White, for example, discusses Camus alongside Frantz Fanon, Mouloud Feraoun, Jean Amrouche and victims of Algeria’s civil war of the 1990s (cf. Djebar 2003).26 Daoud’s Algerian publisher, Sofiane Hadjadi, advocates reclaiming colonial culture as element of Algeria’s contemporary identity: ‘Algeria’s literary heritage is not only post-colonial. You could say that St. Augustine is part of Algeria’s cultural heritage. And so is the generation of colonial writers, like … Jacques Derrida or Albert Camus. It’s really up to us to claim them, and make them part of this history’ (Hadjadi cited in Isaac 2016 148).27 Daoud has associated himself with this attempt to reframe colonial history, calling for the ‘repatriation’ (2013: n.p.) of Camus as an Algerian writer in an editorial for La Cause littéraire (19 November 2013). In response to those who claim that Camus is not an Algerian writer but a French writer born in Algeria, who reject him for choosing not to take up arms in the struggle for independence, an allusion to his infamous response to an Algerian student who pressed him on the question of the anticolonial struggle – ‘I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice’ (Camus cited in Forsdick 2007: 127) – Daoud suggests that Algerians ought to be proud of their whole inheritance, both colonial and native (cf. Daoud 2013: n.p.). The language, culture, architecture and religion that shaped Algeria during colonization

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should be recognized as part of what Algeria has become. Camus, Daoud argues in his editorial, has been denied a place in Algerian literary history because the story of the nation has been simplified and reduced to the history of the Front de liberation nationale (FLN), which excludes the contributions of those judged to be incompatible with that narrative (‘Car, pour le moment, l’histoire algérienne est réduite à la mesure de l’histoire du FLN’ [Daoud 2013: n.p.]). The years since decolonization and political independence have been marked, James McDougall (2006) has argued, by a contestation of Algeria’s national identity. The civil war of the 1990s was, of course, a particularly violent expression of the struggle between religious extremists and the state; however, some commentators have viewed the recent resurgence of Salafism in Algeria as a reflection of the frustration felt by many at the ‘stagnation of the political process’ (Lefèvre 2015: 684). Surveying the post-civil war era, McDougall argues, much like Daoud, that Algerian history has been simplified in the service of creating ‘a single, undifferentiated vision of Algeria’s national “selfhood”’ that denies ‘cultural plurality’ in favour of ‘authenticity’ (McDougall 2006: 223), a view that is echoed in Daoud’s novel by Harun, who claims that here in Oran, you know, people are obsessed with origins. Uled el-bled, the real children of the city, of the country. Everybody wants to be this city’s only son, the first, the last, the oldest. The bastard’s anxiety – sounds like there’s some of that rattling around, don’t you think? Everyone tries to prove he was the first – him, his father, or even his grandfather – to live here. (Daoud 2015: 12)28

When viewed from a postcolonial perspective, the obsession with origins betrays structural similarities with imperialism, which was, as Glissant has argued, premised on uncompromised lines of filiation, securing in perpetuity rights of possession from father to son.29 Overcoming the alienation of colonization, in part, involves an acknowledgement of the nation’s diversity, including the multiple cultural heritages that inform it. Repatriating Camus is, for Daoud, an important step towards that recognition, since Camus’s exclusion from the national canon is part and parcel of the actions of the FLN undertaken in the service of reshaping the identity of a newly decolonized Algeria. As Treacy outlines, the government agency ‘La société nationale d’édition et de diffusion (SNED), early dictated the contours and thematic concerns of the nascent culture industry. State control of literary production during the post-war years sought to establish a cohesive narrative that could sustain the young state’ (2016: 77). Faced with this regulation, many Algerian authors, such as Rachid Boudjedra,

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Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, Tahar Djaout and Rachid Mimouni, turned to Parisian publishers as outlets for works that eschewed the prescribed national narrative. Drawing on the work of Jean Déjeux and Charles Bonn, Treacy notes that studies of the period 1962–83 demonstrate that only ‘23 percent of texts by Algerian authors published in France directly address the war for independence, while among those published in Algeria, only a small fraction do not’ (77). This, of course, fits with Pascale Casanova’s narrative of world literature: national literatures are overdetermined by the political context in which they operate, while literary centres like, above all, Paris allow for innovation, experimentation and a pure art freed from political obligations.30 However, during Algeria’s ‘Black Decade’ of civil war in the 1990s a shift occurred and this time it was Parisian editors who sought political content above aesthetic innovation; novels which offered graphic accounts and testimonies of the violence. No longer at the service of nationalist myth-making, Algerian fiction ‘commodified the national tragedy for western consumption’ (Treacy 2016: 78). Casanova’s literary core, in this instance, was not the guarantor of artistic creativity and freedom, but imposed a politicized agenda. As a result, whether emanating from the periphery or the core, ‘in the majority of novels from this period, politics was out in the open and the abrupt return of the inescapable real made little room for avant-gardist literary innovation or introspective reflection’ (78). Post-2000 has been witness to a loosening of the grip of the realist novel on the Algerian literary imagination with, as Treacy demonstrates in reference to the works of Mustapha Benfodil, Chawki Amari, Kaouther Adimi and Kamel Daoud, the emergence of a diverse literary culture and return to satire, myth and fable as tools for responding to and reimagining the tensions and contradictions of Algerian society. The Meursault Investigation has gained prominence on the global stage alongside this group of contemporary writers, reflecting a common concern with the gaps and omissions within national history. The novel spans the transition of Algeria from colonial to postcolonial state: its structure is non-linear, narrated in present-day Oran by an aged Harun (born 1935), continually looping back to the murder of Musa in 1942, the year The Outsider was published, and recounting the story, in a non-sequential manner, of the family’s subsequent struggle to investigate the circumstances of his death.31 By encompassing the moment of Algeria’s independence, the novel exposes the tensions of the decolonized state as it redefines citizen and outsider: as Kaplan notes, in Daoud we see ‘the Frenchmen as “roumis” or foreigners; the “Arabs” are Algerian citizens’ (2016: 335). However, the act of reversing the polarization of

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colonizer and colonized, self and other, is not, in itself, a sign that the alienation, inequality and ressentiment created by colonization has ceased. Indeed, as Shamsie’s reflection on the act of gaining British citizenship reminds us, it is simply not enough to revise the parameters of legal definitions of citizen and foreigner since it is the very fact that citizenship is at the mercy of government policy alone that is of concern: a fact that highlights, for us, the lie that founds the demos and, regardless of who falls on which side of the divide, creates the conditions by which some lives are counted as less than human and whose words are heard as mere animal noise. The actors in each role may have changed positions (the negative becomes an affirmation of agency), but the structural opposition remains. Or, as Harun claims, ‘independence only pushed people on both sides to switch roles. We were the ghosts in this country when the settlers were exploiting it and bestowing on it their church bells and cypress trees and swans. And today? Well, it’s just the opposite!’ (Daoud 2015: 11). The ongoing condition of ressentiment pervades Harun’s Algeria and independence is portrayed as a promise unfulfilled, an echo of Fanon’s own pessimistic predictions in The Wretched of the Earth: a newly independent nation, but one that is ‘not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labour’ (Fanon 2001: 120). As Harun notes of his surroundings, ‘nothing seems to have changed, if you don’t count the new cinder-block buildings, the storefronts, and the extreme idleness that looks like it’s the rule everywhere. […] The cypresses have disappeared, and so have the hills, under the proliferation of unfinished houses. There are no more roads through the fields. As a matter of fact, there are no more fields’ (Daoud 2015: 30–1). The perpetuation of a structure akin to imperialism in the novel is revealed not simply through the economic failures of the decolonized nation, but more forcefully through the enactment of the mechanics of inclusion and exclusion which regulate what can be said or done within Daoud’s Algeria, most notably by means of a historical narrative which presents a singular vision of the nation and silences alternative histories, minority perspectives and competing accounts of the War of Liberation. As historian Benjamin Stora argues, in Algeria ‘this “writing of history” starts in June 1966, when it was decided to implement a measure of sovereignty by “nationalizing”, through Arabization, the teaching of history’ (Stora cited and translated by Orlando 2015: 866). As an act of dissensus and demonstration of equality, The Meursault Investigation is invested in uncovering that which has been left out of the history of the nation – making visible, as Rancière argued in relation to the victims of the Rwandan

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genocide, the individuality of each victim and inscribing their names ‘in the order of discourse and memorial, because indifference to all these deaths in fact prolongs a certain invisibility’ (Rancière, Baronian and Rosello 2008: 8). This naming is precisely what Harun attempts on behalf of his brother as a riposte to Camus’s Meursault, who never names his victim. However, rather than simply retracing The Outsider in order to uncover its silenced subtext, Daoud’s novel reproduces aspects of Camus’s protagonist in Harun. Notably, in a reversal of his brother’s death at the hands of Meursault, Harun murders a Frenchman in the first few hours of Algerian independence (5 July 1962). While Meursault murders an Arab under the glare of the afternoon sun, Harun confesses that ‘one terrible night, over in Hadjout, the moon obliged me to finish the job your hero began in the sun’ (Daoud 2015: 32); ‘I had to take hold of the clock that registers all the hours of my life and turn the hands back until they showed the exact time when Musa was murdered: Zujj, two o’clock in the afternoon. […] I killed the Frenchman around two in the morning’ (79). As both Kaplan (2015) and Yassin-Kassab (2015) have argued, this act is an allusion to the July 1962 massacre of Europeans in Oran and, as such, to an event which has been erased from the collective memory. Harun’s confession, then, is an implicit challenge to the official history of the Algerian War of Independence – a counternarrative that both reproduces the ‘police’ order, in Rancière’s terms, which is based on the opposition of colonizer and colonized by re-enacting Meursault’s crime, and rewrites the official account by making visible an event that has been excluded (a dissensus). Harun’s arrest and brief imprisonment for this act, another allusion to The Outsider, reveals the an-archy (the absence at the heart of the arkhê) that lies behind the newly independent nation. Just as in The Outsider it becomes apparent that, to the judge and jury, Meursault’s real crime was not the killing of an Arab but the fact that he did not cry at his mother’s funeral, when Musa is hauled in front of an officer of the Army of National Liberation in order to answer for his crime he notes that ‘I knew I wasn’t there for having committed a murder but for not having done so at the right moment’ (Daoud 2015: 107); ‘because nobody could understand why, at my age, I hadn’t joined the resistance, which was fighting to liberate the country and chase out all the Meursaults’ (82). Like Camus, Harun chooses his mother over his country; he refuses to take up arms against the colonizer in the struggle for independence and instead remains with his mother, although even his loyalty to her is not absolute. Through his narrator, Daoud reveals the precarious fictions that belie the nation’s self-image, as well as the exclusions, suppressed voices and obscured events that support it.

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The colonel’s judgement that Harun’s crime was not the act of murder itself but simply the time at which it occurred – he ‘should have done it before’ the July fifth ceasefire, ‘not after’ (109) – is an absurd one both in the everyday sense – since he did not kill on behalf of his country there would be no substantive difference had the act taken place a few days earlier – and in Camus’s – the absence that is revealed at the heart of the nation’s self-image in this distinction between murder and war signals the presence of the absurd, or as he writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, the ‘absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity’ (Camus 1975: 26). The absurd, I argue, anticipates Rancière’s later demand for a dualistic immanence that refuses to prioritize either the actuality of the material world or an excess or otherness that is the former’s potential to change or become-new, since Camus’s concept of the absurd maintains a non-teleological relation between fixed form and chaos, or to recall previous chapters, between Apollo and Dionysus.32 It is this dualism that reveals the lie of the arkhê, the fiction which masks the absence at the heart of the state or community, and which makes possible acts of dissensus, understood as the activity of making visible or heard the excluded other. For Camus, the absurd is produced by this gap between reason and the irrational, the known and the unknown, ‘a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts’ (25). Daoud himself has commented on the absurd as a mode of thinking that can challenge and unsettle dominant ideologies of the nation or dogmatic religions.33 The historical narrative of postcolonial Algeria which omits events such as the July 1962 massacre, or which denies Camus himself a place the national canon, is revealed as a fiction through a confrontation with the absurd. The colonel who ‘launched into a patriotic rant, reiterating his faith in his independent country and in the sacrifice made by one and a half million martyrs’ is reduced to a ‘stammering’ (Daoud 2015: 109) by his own anxious repetition of reasonable excuses in the face of Harun’s incomprehensible motives. The novel takes aim too at the rise of religion and suggests that with it another form of totalitarian repression has taken hold in postcolonial Algeria. In the bar where he tells his story to an unnamed interlocutor, Harun warns his companion that ‘in these parts, you get offered the best liquors after your death, not before […] – in a few years, after the end of the world, the only bar still open will be in Paradise’ (5), and he recalls the story of a wine producer who can no longer ‘find workers because the activity is considered haram, illicit. Even the country’s banks are piling on and refusing him credit’ (51). These signs of a growing religious fundamentalism are visible, Harun claims, in the habits and dress of

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the people he meets everyday: in ‘the little girl with the veil on her head, even though she’s not old enough to know what a body is, or what desire is’ (69–70). In this way Daoud takes aim at an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam, Salafism, which is becoming increasingly popular across North Africa.34 As Lefèvre explains, in contrast to the moderate Malaki interpretation of Islamic religious law, which places an emphasis ‘on adapting Islamic teachings to the local socio-political context’ and is therefore perceived as ‘particularly “open” and “tolerant”’ (Lefèvre 2015: 683), Salafism is associated with groups such as the Free Sahwa Front, who have called for the establishment of an Islamic State under sharia law and have promoted ‘a campaign of hisba to “prohibit what is wrong” in society’, for example, by patrolling ‘Algeria’s coastal region to “clean” cities from “bars and nudity”’ (684).35 Harun rails against such conservatism; however, in the same way that the nationalists consider him to be suspect because of his decision not to fight during the struggle for independence, he is viewed as an outsider by a citizenry defined by their religious faith: ‘Old men like me, fond of red turbans, vests, bow ties, or beautiful, shiny shoes, are becoming rarer and rarer’ (Daoud 2015: 68). This characterization of Harun is, of course, an echo of Meursault’s own outsider status and, as in Camus’s novel, it forms part of a portrait of a society of consent: Sometimes I get to thinking: Now that these people don’t have to go underground and the land is theirs, they don’t know where to go. Friday? It’s not a day when God rested, it’s a day when he decided to run away and never come back. I know this from the hollow sound that persists after the men’s prayer, and from their faces pressed against the window of supplication. And from their coloring, the complexion of people who respond to fear of the absurd with zeal. (69. Emphasis added)

Nationalist and religious convictions are identified as the means for securing individuals’ consent to the existing police order. In such a situation, the absurd becomes a source of fear: a contradiction of the assured myth of origin around which the nation coheres. The outsider’s or rebel’s response, Daoud suggests, when faced with a society in which religion and the nation are afforded the status of absolute truth, even while their omissions and silences reveal their artificiality, is to begin with the absurd in order to construct meaning (cf. Daoud cited in Kaplan 2016: 341). In Rancière’s terms, Harun’s absurdist position is one in which he has recognized ‘the ultimate anarchy on which any hierarchy rests’ (1999: 16), be it that of a religion or that of the state. Harun becomes ‘the

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outsider’ because his actions and appearance place him beyond the boundaries of what is deemed to be acceptable within post-independence Algeria, a profoundly unequal position which he shares with the other ‘bottom-feeders’ (Daoud 2015: 25) who defy the religious conservatism of the state by continuing to drink alcohol or refusing to participate in Friday prayers. Recognition of the mechanisms of exclusion alone, however, does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the inequality of the social hierarchy is a lie and thus equality is the true, natural state: as Rancière makes clear, there are no a priori conditions. At the same time, he maintains that inequality is the more compromised premise for ontology since it is contingent on equality: ‘There is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey […] you must understand the order […]. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you. It is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order’ (Rancière 1999: 16). Rancière constructs a philosophy that assumes a fundamental equality and this allows him to view acts of dissensus as that which not only reveals the absence or impossibility of an indisputable arkhê (God, nation or mother, for that matter), but which also demonstrates the equality of all actors. The nation-state or the police order is, for Rancière and in The Meursault Investigation, created through the people’s faith in a hierarchy and inequality that divides citizen from outsider and, thus, reiterates the imperialist structure of ressentiment. Daoud’s novel, in turn, can be viewed as an act of dissensus – revealing stories that have been excised from the nation’s history, naming those who were unnamed – and as a demonstration of a shared equality which betrays the absurdity of the arkhê – absurd, that is, in Camus’s sense of an absent value held in tension with the desire for order. Camus’s philosophy of the absurd is contemporaneous with his writing of The Outsider; however, in later works he revised his thinking: notably, in The Rebel, he makes an allusion to The Brothers Karamazov as well as to the Russian anarchist Sergey Nechayev, arguing that ‘the absurd […] makes murder seem a matter of indifference, hence, permissible. If one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and nothing is important’ (Camus 2013a: ix).36 As we saw in Chapter Three through J. M. Coetzee’s interrogation of Nechaev’s formula ‘everything is permitted for the sake of the future’ (2004: 200), this absurdist thinking risks fuelling a nihilism in which nothing has value and in which ‘murder seem[s] a matter of indifference’. Harun’s neighbours understandably fear the absurd when viewed in this light. However, reflecting on Camus’s portrait of the rebel vis-à-vis

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the philosophies explored throughout this book reinforces the importance of regarding the absurd as a dualism between an absolute otherness and the world, rather than a celebration of the former alone. When Camus asks, ‘what is a rebel?’ his response is one that recalls Chapter Three’s discussion of Coetzee’s Nechaev insofar as a rebel is identified as ‘a man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation’ (Camus 2013a: 1). They are, in other words, an absolute negation without ideology, a characterization that recalls not only Coetzee’s Nechaev but, more specifically for this study, Deleuze’s account of the Melvillian clerk or scrivener, Bartleby. For Deleuze, it is precisely because Bartleby’s refusal, ‘I would prefer not to’ (Melville 1987: 20), is attached to no referent (he renounces no specific task, expresses no particular preference) that it has the effect of deterritorializing his world. In The Meursault Investigation such is characteristic of Musa more so than his brother Harun insofar as the former attains no distinct specificity in the novel. Even while the text seeks to name and memorialize a figure denied individuality by the colonial text (The Outsider) – ‘a form of resistance to eradication’ as Jane Hiddleston (2017: 160) argues – it nonetheless fails to securely name him. Lia Brozgal, for example, observes that even in The Meursault Investigation ‘Moussa [sic] is a sign of infinite substitution (he could be any Arab); and he is occasionally Zoudj – a time of day, a reference to duplicity’ (2016: 40). This uncertain portrayal of a character rendered indistinct in Camus’s original text may, in Daoud’s hands, be ‘a sidelong glance at colonial literature’s representation of indigenous characters’ (40), but it is one that nonetheless, I argue, reproduces those mechanisms identified by Said in his critique of The Outsider more than it repudiates them. Musa, then, is a negation of Camus’s Arab but not a wholesale renunciation. However, as Deleuze’s account of Bartleby as a figure of primary life or deterritorialization maintains, those characters which reveal the absurdity, otherness or virtual aspect of this world become apparent only through their mediators; Dionysus must speak to us in the voice of Apollo. This is precisely the role of authors or storytellers like Harun: ‘The role of prophets, who are not originals, is to be the only ones who can recognize the wake that originals leave in the world, and the unspeakable confusion and trouble they cause in it’ (Deleuze 1997: 83). For Deleuze, literature can be a symptomatology of the world not in the sense that it offers a description of what is. Rather, the text creates a new understanding that reveals not only how a state of affairs might come to be but also, by signalling their potential for deterritorialization, how they might yet become something very different. As we have seen, this is the writer’s task and it is emphatically one

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directed towards the future, as signalled in the appellation ‘prophet’. And indeed this is precisely what Daoud offers with Harun, the biblical prophet Aaron, brother of Moses. It is in this sense that Harun as storyteller is the prophet both of an independent Algeria fallen into a state of ressentiment in which ‘nothing seems to have changed’ (Daoud 2015: 30), save the social norms that dictate who counts as citizen and as foreigner, and of an Algerian community yet-tocome in which the outsider can be named and accepted. Reading Harun as prophet, however, leads us to a final twist in Daoud’s novel. As several critics have noted, the narrative structure of The Meursault Investigation, in which Harun tells his story to an unknown interlocutor over several nights in a bar in Oran, is an echo not of Camus’s The Outsider, but of his later novel, The Fall: the circular, deceptive, confession of ‘judge-penitent’ (Camus 2013b: 7) Jean-Baptiste Clamence.37 The Fall has been read, as David Ellison has argued, as a reversal of ‘the values on which Christian morality is constructed’, the narrator’s very name an allusion to St John the Baptist, which, in turn, ‘equates the disabused ruminations of [the] protagonist with the act of prophecy’ (Ellison 2007: 185). Indeed, he proclaims himself to be a prophet in the novel, ‘an empty prophet for undistinguished times, an Elijah with no messiah’ (Camus 2013b: 73). His diagnosis of the modern world is one familiar to us given the account of the absurd above: ‘A person who obeys a law is not afraid of judgement: it restores him to a system in which he believes. But the greatest of human torments is to be judged without a law’ (73), judged, in other words, on the basis of an an-archy. This is precisely the fear that Harun observed in his fellow citizens. Not to judge is, of course, the condition of an active force for Deleuze, since judgement ‘presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values), criteria that preexist for all time’ (Deleuze 1997: 134). Indeed, for Camus, this sentiment underlies his distinction that an artist is a justifier not judge of life (cf. Camus 1995: 266). However, Clamence, like Coetzee’s Nechaev, reveals the risk of a world without values. As Ellison argues, the judge-penitent’s confession is ‘a strategy of avoidance’ (2007: 181) with respect to his own guilt about failing to intervene in a suicide or taking water from a dying man. The recurrent water imagery in the novel signals the protagonist’s inverted association with St John the Baptist, who baptized Jesus in the river Jordan, and, as such, ‘whereas the actions of St John and Jesus exemplified the notion of agape – that is, brotherly love or charity wherein all humans demonstrate their essential equality and oneness – the actions and the mad fantasies of Clamence centre in dreams of power and domination’ (185). As we have seen, a god-given or ‘essential equality’

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is the ontological ground of transcendental thinking and a priori structures. Harun’s own guilt, confessed over several meetings with a stranger in a bar, as in The Fall, circles around the absence identified by Clamence. However, while for Clamence, his recognition of the fictionality of values leads him not to abandon judgement altogether, he remains a judge-penitent, but to flaunt, in Ellison’s reading, ‘a “judgemental superiority”’ (186) over his ensnared companion, Daoud’s protagonist demands justice: ‘I think I’d just like justice to be done. […] I don’t mean the justice of the courts, I mean the justice that comes when the scales are balanced’ (Daoud 2015: 6). He both desires a trial – ‘I’d love to have a trial! And I assure you: Unlike your hero, I’d go on trial with the enthusiasm of a liberated man’ (87) – and asserts that in order to free himself from the weight of his family’s past he ‘need[s] neither judge nor God nor the charade of a trial’ (87). Clamence of The Fall places himself above judgement, claiming the status of a (false) prophet insofar as he, and only he, has discovered ‘the truth’ of his age, namely that ‘we are all judges, we are all guilty before each other’ (Camus 2013b: 73). He has, in other words, judged all of mankind and found all to be guilty. Harun, on the other hand, seeks recognition and not judgement; he demands a trial only in the sense that it might afford him a chance to state, for the record, ‘my family name, my given name, and my ancestry’ (Daoud 2015: 88). Thus, whereas with Shamsie’s Aneeka we were left questioning whether or not her demand for justice and not judicial judgement (law) was a claim made, like Antigone before her, in the name of the unwritten laws of the gods or of ethics, Daoud’s Harun expressly links justice to visibility: for him, to record his and his brother’s names would be an act of balancing the scales or, in other words, the staging of equality. This attempted act of justification and not judgement, then, is an echo of Camus’s characterization of the specific work of the artist (to justify but not to judge), but moreover, for us, it is the activity of memorializing that which history has erased, a dissensus. Harun demands justice, a balancing of the scales, but not as recourse to an ethics or judgement made on the grounds of secular rather than religious or a priori values. Justice, here, is the demonstration of a non-essential equality as expressed through the recognition of the validity of the words and actions of those deemed to be outsiders. As we saw in Coetzee’s portrayal of Dostoevsky in Chapter Three, the writer or storyteller as witness to figures of absurd life, who reveal the otherness within their society, risks finding in that experience a renewed condition of ressentiment, and in that sense Harun shares something of Clamence’s bitterness. The story of his brother, however, also brings Meriem into his life and, therefore, holds out the possibility of a future for

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Harun defined by love rather than revenge. That, however, remains a possibility foreclosed by the persistent presence of his mother. Through the mother-figure of The Meursault Investigation Daoud suggests that loyalty to one’s mother as much as to one’s country can become a source of oppression. As with The Master of Petersburg, it is the act of bearing witness to the deterritorializations caused by others, or, in Rancière’s words, exploring the gaps or fissures in the police order, that signals literature’s potential for dissensus and dissent. In a postcolonial context, it represents the possibility of a future in which the polarization of self and other, colonizer and colonized is more than simply reversed. The Meursault Investigation presents its own prophet, Harun, who diagnoses the condition of ressentiment within postcolonial Algeria and, like Shamsie, makes visible the processes of inclusion and exclusion not merely to reveal how the nation came to be what it is but as a means to reimagine those bonds of community. While the risk remains that acts of dissensus or deterritorialization will return further forms of hierarchy or oppression, what they reveal of the fiction of indisputable order or absolute truth means that the potential remains for future acts of dissent. What we have seen through the addition of Rancière, Shamsie and Daoud to Postcolonialism After World Literature’s exploration of immanent philosophies of the world and text as an assemblage is that active rather than reactive forms of dissent might implicate concepts of otherness that need not lead us to privilege difference as the ontological ground of postcolonial thinking. Rather, it is towards a renewed concept of equality that postcolonial studies can turn in light of contemporary world literary criticism and its attendant focus on world-systems: an equality that is enacted in every performance of dissent, making visible those lives and histories rendered invisible and heard the subaltern speech that has been silenced or considered mere animal noise. In doing so, both literature and our critical engagements with it can participate in the ongoing reimagining of new forms of belonging, community and global citizenship no longer regulated by an imperialist hierarchy.

Notes Introduction 1 In the entry for 31 January 1827 Goethe is recorded as commenting on his reading of Chinese literature, noting that the Chinese ‘think, act, and feel almost exactly like us; and we soon find that we are perfectly like them, excepting that all they do is more clear, more pure, and decorous than with us’ (1906: 211). What follows is his infamous proclamation of an era of world literature: ‘I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now rather an unmeaning term: the epoch of World literature is at hand, and everyone must hasten its approach’ (213). 2 See Edward Said’s Orientalism (cf. Said 1985). 3 Emphasis is in the original. Throughout the remainder of this book, emphases are reproduced exactly as in the original without this note. Where emphasis has been added or modified, this has been indicated in parenthesis. 4 See also Mufti’s recent Forget English! (2016). A comparison between nineteenthcentury and contemporary concepts of world literature as reflections of their economic conditions is also offered in an editorial to a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, ‘Postcolonial and World Literature’: ‘the re-emergence of “world literature” in the first decade of the 21st century parallels the ascendancy of neoliberal capitalism and its attendant discourses, just as its first emergence in Goethe’s cosmopolitan Weltliteratur and Marx and Engels’s anticipation of a literature superseding “national one-sidedness” paralleled the 19th-century expansion of the world market’ (Graham et al. 2008: 465). 5 As Stuart Hall argues, the remit of postcolonial studies extends far beyond the analysis of imperialism in its historical and discursive articulations to modernity more broadly: as ‘signifying the whole process of expansion, exploration, conquest, colonisation and imperial hegemonisation which constituted the “outer face”, the constitutive outside, of European and then Western capitalist modernity after 1492’ (1996: 249). 6 Jason Moore’s concept of world-ecology can be found in Moore (2003). See also Warwick (2015: 17) and Lazarus (2011b: 122). 7 This is a predominant aspect of Pascale Casanova’s argument, which I address in detail in Chapter One (cf. Casanova 2004, 2005). 8 Apter also discusses the use of world-systems theory in relation to Franco Moretti in Against World Literature (2013: 45–56).

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9 The post-critical turn takes up the philosophy of Bruno Latour and, perhaps ironically, offers a critique of modes of analysis which seek to uncover evidence of unconscious desire (psychoanalysis), lack (poststructuralism), or structural conditions (Marxism) that shape the text. This method privileges the position of the canny critic who knows more than the text itself. See Rita Felski (2015) and Bruno Latour (2004). 10 Melissa Kennedy claims to draw on the influence of both Neil Lazarus’s Jameson-inspired The Postcolonial Unconscious and Rita Felski’s specific understanding of the affective power of literature, for example, in The Uses of Literature (cf. Kennedy 2017: 13). Given the strength of hostility evidenced by Felski (2015) to Jameson’s theory of literature in The Limits of Critique this marriage is not as simple as Kennedy credits. While recognizing the priority that Felski affords to a reader’s response to the text, Kennedy does not address the challenge she poses to the digging-down approach of Jameson (and by extension Lazarus) in which the text is understood primarily as the bearer of those signs that register the history of capitalism. Kennedy’s Narratives of Inequality reproduces this critical apparatus by valuing literature ‘as in some way reflecting, representing, and portraying aspects of the economy, often in a critical fashion’ (2017: 8). 11 See Chapter One for a discussion of Dimock’s ‘Literature for the Planet’ (2001). 12 He does this, albeit briefly, with his concept of ‘plasma’, which is defined as the ‘not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized’; that which is ‘in between and not made of social stuff. It is not hidden, simply unknown. It resembles a vast hinterland providing the resources for every single course of action to be fulfilled’ (Latour 2007: 244). In this respect, I argue, it is comparable to the Deleuzian virtual. 13 A good introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy can be found in Cerbone (2008) and Wrathall (2005). 14 Although addressed to a specifically American national context, Mitchum Huehls’s After Critique (2016) offers a productive counterpoint to Cheah. They share a common concern to understand the political work of literature in a globalized context, how it might create alternative futures that challenge global inequalities, and both propose a philosophically informed model of literature premised on immanence rather than dialectical negation, privileging ‘ontological forms of meaning-making’ (Huehls 2016: xii) rather than representational ones as the basis for literary critique. However, Huehls pointedly reveals why use of the term ‘normative’ poses a problem for a literary criticism that purports to offer resistance to the global, neoliberal hegemony. 15 Caygill’s exploration of philosophies of resistance which veer between the reactive and affirmative or creative processes envisioned by Nietzsche and others since is discussed in Chapter Three (cf. Caygill 2015).

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Chapter 1 1 Jameson offers his own response to Ahmad’s criticism in Social Text (cf. Jameson 1987). For a considered evaluation of the history and claims of this argument, see Lazarus (2004) and Sprinker (1993). 2 As Charles Forsdick notes, in a nod to the characterization of postcolonial theory as a field dominated by Said, Spivak and Bhabha, world literature has formed its own ‘“Holy Trinity” of scholars – Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch and Franco Moretti – whose distinctive takes on world literature have become recurrent points of reference in discussion of the phenomenon. There have been other important interventions, by scholars such as Emily Apter, Natalie Melas, Christopher Prendergast and Gayatri Spivak, but Casanova’s “World Republic of Letters”, Damrosch’s predominantly relational definition […] and Franco Moretti’s notion of “distant reading” continue to dominate’ (Forsdick 2010: 130–1). Similarly, Adam Kirsch suggests that Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters ‘has become nearly as ubiquitous as Goethe in discussion of world literature’ (2016: 20). 3 Casanova’s indebtedness to Wallerstein is less explicit compared to the case of Bourdieu, who supervised her doctoral thesis (the work that became The World Republic of Letters). As Christopher Prendergast notes, ‘amazingly’ The World Republic of Letters makes no direct reference to either Franco Moretti or Immanuel Wallerstein, even while ‘this notion [of one and unequal] underlies her entire project (if there is no mention of Wallerstein, she does cite Braudel’s formula of “unequal structures”)’ (2004: 6). Prendergast signals the Wallersteinian underpinnings of Casanova’s work, an influence that Thorne’s essay exposes to a greater degree. This chapter, then, follows the implications of both Prendergast’s and Thorne’s observations concerning Casanova’s application of world-system theory. 4 That Casanova singles out Paris in particular as the core of her literary republic has been criticized by her commentators. See, for example, Buescu (2014). 5 Prendergast posits a similar conclusion, arguing that Casanova assumes an ‘a priori category of the nation’ (2004: 21). 6 On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, Simon Gikandi summarized the influence of Achebe’s novel: ‘Chinua Achebe is considered to be the most influential African novelist of the modern period and the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958 was a seminal event in the history of African letters. Over ten million copies of Things Fall Apart have been sold in the English-speaking world since its publication and it has been translated into over fifty languages. Considered to be a foundational work in the making of modern literature, the novel is taught in institutions of education in several continents’ (Gikandi 2009: 4). 7 Of course this study follows suit by including this discussion of The World Republic; however, it does so with the aim of exposing the conceptual problems inherent in this model for world literature in the hope of striking out in a new direction.

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8 Adam Kirsch comes close to echoing this strong stance against Casanova by finding in her work ‘an echo of the Frankfurt School’s mid-twentieth-century attack on the American culture industry, which was said to mass-market kitsch in order to stupefy the population into obedience. Like Theodor Adorno, contemporary critics of world literature bemoan the disappearance of aesthetic originality and difficulty, and the corruption of popular taste for the sake of corporate profit and control’ (2016: 23). 9 As Laferrière has commented, labels denote the institutionalization of writers and fiction – ‘labels are related to institutions’ (‘Les étiquettes sont liées aux institutions’) (Laferrière cited in Morency and Thibeault 2011: n.p.). 10 This also echoes Soyinka’s comments on negritude, which ‘trapped itself in what was primarily a defensive role’ (1976: 129) and ‘stayed within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectual analysis both of man and society and tried to re-define the African and his society in those externalised terms’ (36). 11 Laferrière writes that ‘a new grammar flourished under my fingers’ (‘Une grammaire inédite fleurissait sous mes doigts’) and a ‘new language nourished by anxiety, ink, blood and a celebration of one’s intimate self ’ (‘cette nouvelle langue nourrie d’angoisses, d’encre, de sang et fête intimes’) (Laferrière 2014: 12). 12 ‘To all those who would like to read me in their language, I note that nothing prevents me from being translated, because the dream of any book is to make a new skin’ (‘À tous ceux qui voudraient me lire dans leur langue, je signale que rien n’empêche qu’on me traduise, car le rêve de tout livre est de faire peau neuve’) (Laferrière 2014: 12). 13 Relation is a concept which Édouard Glissant (1997) develops in Poetics of Relation and elsewhere. Aspects of this concept will be addressed in later chapters, but for a fuller exploration of the philosophical range of this concept, see Burns (2012). 14 Walcott argues that many readers saw Omeros as ‘a reinvention of the Odyssey, but this time in the Caribbean. I mean, what would be the point of doing that? What this implies is that geologically, geographically, the Caribbean is secondary to the Aegean. What this does immediately is to humiliate the landscape’ (Walcott 1997: 232). 15 These quotes are taken from Laferrière’s reception speech to the Académie Française on 28 May 2015: ‘Legba allows a mortal to move from the visible world to the invisible world and then return to the visible world. He is therefore the god of writers’ (‘Legba permet à un mortel de passer du monde visible au monde invisible, puis de revenir au monde visible. C’est donc le dieu des écrivains’) (Laferrière 2015: n.p.). 16 This is Deleuze’s critique of Hegel and the basis of his comparison of the German philosopher with Henri Bergson: ‘In Bergson […] the thing differs with itself first, immediately. According to Hegel, the thing differs with itself because it differs first with all that it is not’ (cited in Hardt 1993: 7).

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17 References to ‘Conjectures’ are taken from Moretti’s Distant Reading, which reproduces articles published between 1994 and 2009 along with a more recent introductory note from Moretti. For the original New Left Review Essay, see Moretti (2000a). 18 For an analysis of Moretti’s nuanced understanding of tragedy see Ben Hewitt’s Byron, Shelley, and Goethe’s Faust, which addresses the Kantian basis of Moretti’s argument in comparison with Lucien Goldmann’s reading of Kant and as such argues for the continuing potential of tragedy to offer a source of resistance and not merely consent (cf. Hewitt 2015: 25–34). 19 See Jameson’s account of post-/structuralism in The Prison-House of Language (Jameson 1974: 108–9). 20 Moretti applies Bloch’s concept of non-contemporaneity to One Hundred Years of Solitude in Modern Epic (cf. Moretti 1996: 242–5). 21 On this connection between Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, see John Sallis (1991: 32). The final chapter of Fiona Hughes’s Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement discusses similar responses: highlighting that for Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and Hölderlin, Kant’s philosophy was ‘marred by an insuperable riff between subject and object’ (2010: 154). 22 I have in mind here, specifically, the work of actor-network theory as described by Latour, addressed in Chapter Two. For a fuller account of Marx’s theory of the commodity and the commodity fetish, see David Harvey (2010: 15–53). 23 David Harvey’s reading of Capital, for example, stresses the way in which Marx’s dialectical concept of the commodity should not be read in Hegelian terms. For Marx, the commodity can be said to hold two aspects – use-value and exchangevalue – in a dialectical relation, however ‘this is not Hegelian logic in the strict sense, because there is no final moment of synthesis, only a temporary moment of unity within which yet another contradiction – a duality – is internalized’ (Harvey 2010: 26). 24 See Fiona Hughes (2010), especially the final chapter. 25 This is the aim of Fiona Hughes’s Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (2010). 26 Critics who have read Bolaño, and specifically By Night in Chile, in terms that evoke the barbarism and violence of the global present include López-Vicuña (2009), Villaloboso-Ruminott (2009) and Jelly-Schapiro (2015). 27 The connection to this historical figure is made by Medina (2009: 550) and Villalobo-Ruminott (2009: 198). 28 In the original Spanish version, these characters are named Oido (odio, Spanish for hate) and Odeim (miedo, fear) (cf. O’Bryen 2011). 29 Hensbergen notes that Picasso’s dove of peace was in fact based on a Milanese pigeon and that the painter ‘would name his daughter Paloma, born that month [of the Peace Congress], after the bird’ (2004: 198).

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30 Georges Boudaille, for example, lists Guernica (1937), Charnel House (1945), Night Fishing at Antibes (1951), Homage to the Spaniards Who Died for France (1946), Massacre in Korea (1951) and The Fall of Icarus (1958) which resides in the conference hall of the UNESCO building in Paris (1988: 100). 31 Jimmy Thompson is based on the husband of Callejas, Michael Townley who was a CIA agent and an operative with Pinochet’s secret police, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, during the 1970s. 32 Wallenstein argues that ‘the sheer volume of Lacroix’s readings renders the report of it absurd. The accumulation of authors seems to be for its own sake’ (2014: 140). 33 See López-Vicuña (2009) for a complementary account of ‘The Purple Wig’ in relation to By Night in Chile.

Chapter 2 1 The correspondence between Kantian philosophy and post-/structuralism has also been observed by Fredric Jameson. As he argues in The Prison-House of Language, structuralism reproduces the Kantian distinction between phenomena and the thing-in-itself as the signifier and the signified, and, while deconstruction introduces the concept of lack in relation to the signified, it remains ‘essentially a replay of the Kantian dilemma of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself ’ (Jameson 1974: 109). Moreover, foreshadowing Latour, this ontology of distinct categories problematically enforces an a priori structure onto thought: ‘as in Kant also, the separation of the mental processes from reality encourages an explicit search for the permanent structures of the mind itself, the organizational categories and forms through which the mind is able to experience the world, or to organize meaning in what is essentially in itself meaningless’ (109). 2 As Deleuze notes in relation to his complementarity with the philosophy of Michel Foucault, ‘we weren’t looking for origins, even lost or deleted ones, but setting out to catch things where they were at work, in the middle’ (1995: 86). 3 Of his time as a student of philosophy at the Sorbonne during the 1940s, Deleuze claims that ‘I could not see any way of extracting myself. I could not stand Descartes, the dualisms and the Cogito, or Hegel, the triad and the operation of the negation. But I liked writers who seemed to be part of the history of philosophy, but who escaped from it in one respect, or altogether: Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 11). Blok and Jenson (2011) provide a good introduction to Latour’s philosophical influences, although there is no critical consensus on the compatibility of Latour and Deleuze. Michum Huehls (2016), for example, regards them as incompatible with respect to the role of the virtual in Deleuze. Graham Harman (2009), while noting the connection with

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Nietzsche, argues that Latour’s philosophy is not premised on substance, since traditionally a substance can maintain qualities, which, while open to change, can change without altering an essential core. This position on substance, however, is at odds with the Deleuzian model, in which there is no primary core but rather a single plane of immanence in which change emerge through the relation of actual and virtual – a dualistic structure I find echoed in Latour’s account of a relational network of actors and its unformatted background or ‘plasma’ (Latour 2007: 244). The reference here is to stories found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as Shakespeare’s narrative poem ‘Venus and Adonis’ (1593). In a different context, Kathleen Renk also misses this nuance. By Renk’s reading, all antagonistic characters are Dionysian; arguing that the state and Islamic terrorists alike in this novel ‘both engender the notion of a Dionysian “god” dwelling within, a god that will slay the impure and create a new world’ (2016: 62). This is emphatically not the god of Euripides’ The Bacchae, nor Nietzsche’s dualistic account of tragedy. Dionysus as god is an anarchic and chaotic will that cannot be directed towards predetermined ends, as is the case in the utopian and fundamentalist views of Buckley or Mark. This assertion follows John Sallis’s reading of The Birth of Tragedy. As Sallis points out, Nietzsche famously discredited The Birth of Tragedy in his later Ecce Homo by calling it ‘offensively Hegelian’ and dialectical (Nietzsche 2004: 48). However, Sallis’s book aims to resituate The Birth of Tragedy as a supplement to Nietzsche’s philosophy broadly, and argues that properly understood ‘the logic of Apollinian and Dionysian, the logic that governs the inscription and effacement of Nietzsche’s text, is […] not a dialectic, but a logic of excess’ (Sallis 1991: 57). Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy maintains a similar view, arguing that Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy ‘not as a dialectician but as a disciple of Schopenhauer […] [who] himself did not value the dialectic very highly’ (Deleuze 2006: 10). For Deleuze, while early sections of The Birth of Tragedy veer dangerously close to the dialectical method which stages a negative opposition of contraries to be resolved, the fundamental ‘contradiction in the Birth of Tragedy is between primitive unity and individuation, willing and appearance, life and suffering’ (11) and that it was in the ‘affirmative character of Dionysus’ that Nietzsche discovered ‘the affirmation of life instead of its higher solution or justification’ (13). Sallis makes the point that while Nietzsche clearly acknowledges his debt to Schopenhauer he refrains from taking forward his predecessor’s Kantianism ‘because, in strict terms, the [Kantian] thing-in-itself is so utterly unknowable that any such movement of interpretation would have to be declared illegitimate in principle. […] For what Nietzsche recognized almost from the time of his first encounter with Schopenhauer’s work is how readily Schopenhauer crosses and recrosses the boundary, in principle uncrossable, between phenomena and

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Notes thing-in-itself ’ (Sallis 1991: 32). Or, in Latourian terms, Schopenhauer more readily cedes the hybridity of a world that has never been modern. Silenus makes an appearance in Eating Air as Donny’s drinking companion, Sil. Paul Raimond Daniels (2013) provides a succinct account of this in Nietzsche and the Birth of Tragedy, while a précis of each stage of Nietzsche’s argument can be found in Silk and Stern’s Nietzsche on Tragedy (cf. Silk and Stern 1981, chapter 4). In The Birth of Tragedy, ‘the true opposition is not the wholly dialectical one between Dionysus and Apollo but the deeper one between Dionysus and Socrates. It is not Apollo who is opposed to the tragic or through whom the tragic dies, it is Socrates: and Socrates is as little Apollonian as Dionysian’ (Deleuze 2006: 13). See John Sallis (1991: 43) for this claim concerning The Bacchae. This comment from The Birth of Tragedy is discussed in relation to Goethe’s Weltliteratur by Stefan Hosel-Uhlig (2004). This is a reference to the historical events of 4 October 1992 when a Boeing 747 cargo aircraft, El Al Flight 1862, crashed into the Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg flats in the Bijlmermeer. As in the novel, the plane was carrying components of the nerve gas, sarin. I return to the writings of Albert Camus in Chapter Four where his philosophy of resistance and the absurd is read in relation to Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation. For this reason Gerard de Vries suggests that ‘an “actor-network” is not a network of actors’, implying a pre-formed structure into which actors are placed, ‘but an assembly of actants who (by way of the translations they are involved in) are “networked” and defined by the other actants’ (Vries 2016: 92). In this respect Latour is clearly signalling his affinity for Nietzsche rather than Kant. As Nietzsche writes: ‘The properties of a thing are effects on other “things”: if one removes other “things”, then a thing has no properties, i.e., there is no thing without other things, i.e., there is no “thing-in-itself ” ’ (1968: 302). There are two terms – actor and actant – that Latour uses interchangeably without consistently differentiating them. However, he argues in Reassembling the Social that ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor – or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant’ (2007: 71). This may suggest that ‘actant’ refers to abstract assemblages, however one might put pressure on this distinction by suggesting that anything narrated within an account, no matter how abstract, is by that process given figuration. ‘Sarah Golstein asked a very good, Candide-like question: You decide to rely on another critic. Fine. But what if he’s wrong? My reply: If he’s wrong, you are wrong too, and you soon know, because you don’t find any corroboration’ (Moretti 2013: 53). Latour’s precise definition of ‘force’ is tricky to pin down. As Gerard de Vries points out, Latour’s notion of force could simply be substituted by ‘actants’ (2016:

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63), a term that is itself often interchangeable with actor. All share a common capacity to connect and transform – they each ‘modify a state of affairs by making a difference’ – but differ insofar as actant and, I would add, force have ‘no figuration yet’ (Latour 2007: 71). I share de Vries’ reservations about the precision of Latour’s terminology on this point.

Chapter 3 1 For a critique of the ways in which postcolonial theory remains too distant from political action see Parry (2004), and for one that comments on its closeness, see Casanova (2004, 2005). 2 Writer-activist is a term used to group Arundhati Roy with figures such as Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nadine Gordimer and Jamaica Kincaid in Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence (2011). 3 For further information see, for example, newspaper reports on this legislation, such as The Guardian, 16 April 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/ apr/16/india-third-gender-claims-place-in-law. 4 See Nietzsche (2003: 104). 5 Ashok Da. Ranade notes this particular association with a musical or dance performance in the entry for mehfil (Ranade 2006: 29). 6 Apollo, for Nietzsche, ‘holds sway over the beautiful illusion of the inner fantasy world. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast to imperfectly comprehensible daily reality’ (2003: 16). 7 See Nietzsche (2003: 60–4). 8 As Parry writes of Coetzee’s novels, they offer muted or ventriloquized subjects of colonial power and thus ‘the dominated are situated as objects of representation and mediations which offer them no place from which to resist the modes that have constituted them’ (1998: 151). 9 While Attridge finds only a loose connection between Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg and Coetzee’s South Africa, Jane Poyner identifies in the novel a number of important ‘parallels between Tsarist Russia and apartheid South Africa […] both are oppressive societies which have subjected their citizens to censorship, imprisonment, torture and exile; both nations are undergoing seismic change’ (Poyner 2009: 133). 10 Most modern editions now include this chapter in the appendix; see for example Dostoevsky (2008). 11 ‘Sensualist’ is a prominent descriptor of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, and indeed of the depraved aspects of the Karamazov line, in Dostoevsky’s novel. Part One, Book Three, ‘Sensualists’, for example, tells of the rape of a local girl and ‘holy fool’

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(97), Stinking Lizaveta by, it is implied, Fyodor Pavlovich. The patriarch’s servants Grigory and Marfa take in the resulting child, Smerdyakov. 12 Graham Harman, like Mitchum Heuhls (2016), reads Latour in opposition to the philosophy of Deleuze, and does so through the familiar, Badiouian, criticism that ‘Deleuze’s notion of “the virtual” is designed precisely to move philosophy away from [the] actual […]. Recall that there is no such thing for Latour as a “becoming” that would exceed individual actors. Nor is there any “virtuality” that exceeds them’ (Harman 2009: 101). What both Harman and Heuhls overlook is Latour’s introduction of ‘plasma’ as a concept that accounts for change and newness within the actual. In Reassembling the Social, plasma is introduced as a placeholder for that which remains unconnected as a society-network forms. Inspired by Gabriel Tarde’s monad, plasma is ‘the background necessary for every activity to emerge’ (Latour 2007: 243); the ‘not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized’; that which is ‘in between and not made of social stuff. It is not hidden, simply unknown. It resembles a vast hinterland providing the resources for every single course of action to be fulfilled’ (244). This ‘not yet’ cannot be reduced to ‘the possible’ and, as such, it echoes Deleuze’s own hesitancy in equating his virtual with the possible: ‘the real is supposed to be the image of the possible that it realizes’ and, as such, the possible is that which ‘has existence or reality added to it’, but the ‘virtual, on the other hand, does not have to be realized, but rather actualized; and the rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference or divergence and of creation’ (Deleuze 1991: 97). In other words, the actualization of the virtual designates the emergence of something wholly new and not that which can be presupposed as possible from the perspective of the actual at a particular moment in time. It is, to evoke Latour, ‘not hidden, [but] simply unknown’: an absolute difference and thus that which cannot be registered or known within the actual prior to its actualization. Harman and Heuhls pursue a Badiouian reading of Deleuze, arguing that the virtual is privileged as the primary site of ontology. By this model, as Peter Hallward (2006) has argued, Deleuze’s philosophy leads us out of this world towards a virtual plane of indifferentiation. I simply do not find this in Deleuze: the two sides, actual and virtual, are continually mobilized in his philosophy of the immanent production of difference and his non-dialectical account of newness. Similarly, if we take into account Latour’s concept of plasma then the view of him as a philosopher of the actual alone severely limits the potential of his thought to account for change. Rather, both Deleuze and Latour are philosophers of immanence and of relation who, in the Spinozist tradition, posit an immanent whole that is at once actual and virtual. 13 This is an echo of Coetzee’s own account of freedom – ‘I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs

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representations – which are shadows themselves – of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light’ (Coetzee 1992: 340–1). I return to this passage in the final pages of this chapter. 14 Deleuze’s description of minor literature in Essays maintains that established with Guattari in Kafka: ‘The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 18). 15 In May 1878 Dostoevsky’s youngest son, Alyosha, by his second wife Anna Grigorievna died of epilepsy, a condition he inherited from his father (cf. Holquist 1977: 173). 16 Grant Hamilton’s study of Coetzee similarly employs Deleuzian thought to address the ‘yet-to-come’ aspect of the author’s fiction. Hamilton proposes to rethink specifically colonial subjectivity as a flight from colonial representation and, via Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Foe, argues that Coetzee’s work ‘opens out on to a people “yet-to-come”’ (2011: xxix). This, then, is a complimentary account of Coetzee’s work, even while its focus on the colonial subject and colonial discourse obscures the distinctiveness of postcoloniality, which, in my view, Deleuze’s philosophy (and Coetzee’s fiction) helps to elucidate.

Chapter 4 1 Of the first group (globalization) see Sarah Brouillette (2011), Rebecca Walkowitz (2015) and Richard Watts (2005); for the second (world-systems) see Nicholas Brown (2005), Pascale Casanova (2004, 2005), Melissa Kennedy (2017), Neil Lazarus (2011a, b), Franco Moretti (1988, 1996, 2013), Michael Niblett (2012), Stephen Shapiro (2008), Michael Walonen (2016) and Warwick (2015). 2 See Kennedy (2017) and Walonen (2016). For an introduction to ‘world-ecology’, see Moore (2003) and for recent examples of the world-ecology approach Campbell and Niblett (2016), Deckard (2012) and Niblett (2012). 3 In proposing equality rather than inequality as the assumption of postcolonial thinking, this book follows Julian Brown’s political analysis of contemporary South Africa. Brown too uses Rancière to argue that ‘the presumption of equality’ rather than inequality ‘exposes cracks and shortcomings in the social order, and makes politics happen’ (2015: 149). 4 On the three metals and Plato’s lie, see Rancière (2003: 17–21). Two introductory guides to the work of Rancière also recount the significance of this myth: see Davis (2010: 18–19) and Tanke (2011: 28–31). 5 See Signs Taken for Wonders, chapter one, ‘The Soul and the Harpy’ (Moretti 1988).

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6 Notable revisions can be traced between the 1988 and 2010 versions of Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In particular, deleted from the later version is the statement in which Spivak makes a particular demand of the critic: ‘The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with “woman” as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish’ (1988: 308). Also deleted is the specific clarification that the notion that the subaltern cannot speak is strictly a matter of being heard: ‘There is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak’ (308). The 2010 version almost entirely refutes this comment, even while, it seems to me, the entirety of the essay is directed towards this conclusion: ‘I was so unnerved by this failure of communication that, in the first version of this text, I wrote, in the accents of passionate lament: the subaltern cannot speak! It was an inadvisable remark’ (Spivak 2010: 63). 7 On the tailors’ strike see Rancière’s On the Shores of Politics (2007: 45–52). For discussion of Rancière’s account, see Davis (2010: 84–5) and Tanke (2011: 60–1). 8 See Chapter Three for a discussion of Glissant’s opacity and in his Poetics of Relation (1997). 9 On Rancière’s anarchic concept of equality as declassification, also see Hallward (2009). 10 In a similar respect, Chanter argues that Žižek’s Lacanian reading of Antigone is ‘politically reactive’ (2010: 22). 11 Lacan’s reading of Antigone is featured in his seventh seminar, ‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’ (cf. Lacan 1992). 12 The UK Faber and Faber edition of The Burial at Thebes, unfortunately, does not include this afterword. Only the US Farrar, Strauss and Giroux edition contains these comments concerning the playwright’s influences and concerns as he undertook this translation for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. 13 Bush used this phrase, for example, in an address to Congress on 20 September 2001. A transcript of his speech can be found at http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US /09/20/gen.bush.transcript/ (accessed 15 April 2018). Shamsie herself reflects on the impact of hearing this sentiment on the stage of global politics (cf. Shamsie 2012: n.p.). For an evaluation of the contemporary significance of the rhetoric of the war on terror, see Butler (2006: 1–18). 14 Heaney genders this passage by having Antigone claim that she would not make this sacrifice for a husband or a son. Robert Fagles’s translation, on the other hand, presents a balance between feminine and masculine in the same passage: ‘If I had been the mother of children / or if my husband died, exposed and rotting – / I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself, / never defied our people’s will’ (Sophocles 1984: 105).

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15 Chanter situates Antigone within the wider contexts of the Iraq war, Irish nationalism, Apartheid South Africa and Nazi France, in reference to the various ways in which the play has been staged as an act of defiance (by Heaney in Ireland, by Athol Fugard in South Africa [The Island, 1973], and by Jean Anouilh in Vichy France [1943]). See Chanter (2010, 2011). 16 This parallel is noted too by Judith Butler, who argues that in the binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’ we can see the trace of ‘an anachronistic division between “East” and “West” […] between civilization (our own) and barbarism (now coded as “Islam” itself)’ (2006: 2). 17 Subsequent to Shamsie’s novel, the first British Asian Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, was appointed in April 2018 following the resignation of Amber Rudd in the wake of the Windrush scandal. During Javid’s first address to the House during Prime Minister’s Questions he pledged to address the ‘hostile environment’ policy of the Home Office, which, it emerged through a series of reports by The Guardian newspaper in particular, had refused to grant British citizenship to those of the Windrush generation who came to Britain as children following the 1948 Nationalities Act as citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. In 2018 it was revealed that people of the Windrush generation were being denied British passports and sometimes refused reentry into the country after travel abroad because they were unable to satisfactorily document their residency status (cf. The Guardian, 15 April 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/15/why-the-childrenof-windrush-demand-an-immigration-amnesty?CMP=share_btn_tw. Accessed 15 May 2018). On 24 April 2018 Channel Four news reported on a case in which this situation had rendered some second generation children of the Windrush migration ‘citizens of nowhere’, having been born in Britain to Caribbean parents (cf. https:// www.channel4.com/news/how-children-and-grandchildren-of-windrush-have-be en-affected. Accessed 15 May 2018). This follows Margaret Thatcher’s redefinition of British citizenship in 1981, a move designed, Salman Rushdie argued, ‘to deprive black and Asian Britons of their citizenship rights’, which striped all of ‘the right to citizenship by virtue of birth, the ius soli, or right of the soil. For nine centuries any child born on British soil was British. Automatically. By right. Not by permission of the State. The Nationalities Act abolished the ius soli. From now on citizenship is the gift of government. You were blind, because you believed the Act was aimed at the blacks; and so you sat back and did nothing as Mrs Thatcher stole the birthright of every one of us, black and white, and of our children and grandchildren forever’ (Rushdie 1992: 135–6). Shamsie’s fears for the precarity of citizenship rights, recent events have underscored, were prescient to say the least. 18 See Chapter Two for more detail on Gray’s arguments. 19 Also see Claire Chambers (2018) for further analysis of the role of sound and, in Spivak’s sense, listening.

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20 Harper Dafforn (2017) and Paul Fulcher (2017) have noted the Terry/Tiresias connection implied in her name (Terry short for Theresa) and her function as the voice of caution in the novel. Her words, though, also recall Haemon’s plea to his father, Creon, ‘I hear everything / Or overhear it. And all that’s talked about / In this city now is Antigone. / People are heartbroken for her. What, / They’re asking, did she do so wrong?’ (Heaney 2005: 43). 21 This is an echo of Deleuze’s own critique of Plato, who introduced ‘a new type of transcendence’, ‘a transcendence that can be exercised and situated within the field of immanence itself ’, and modern philosophy which has followed suit and erected ‘a transcendence at the heart of immanence as such’ (Deleuze 1997: 137). For Rancière’s parallel comment that Deleuze introduces transcendence into the plane of immanence, see Rancière (2010: 180). 22 For an introduction to Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’ and why it ought not to be taken as a return to transcendence, see Claire Colebrook (2002: 71). 23 Harun and Musa are the Romanized Arabic rendering of two prophets, Aaron and Moses, figures which cut across Christian and Islamic religions and whose story in ‘Exodus’, Issac notes, presents one, Musa/Moses, as ‘the favoured sibling whose “truth” requires the intercession of his brother’, Harun/Aaron (Issac 2016: 146). The Meursault Investigation reproduces this ‘intercession’ to a certain extent by making Harun responsible for the retelling of Musa’s story. The correspondence between Harun/Aaron and Musa/Moses as direct biblical/Quranic allusions has been observed by a number of reviewers and critics (cf. Brozgal 2016; Hiddleston 2017: 162; Moaveni 2015; Lalami 2015; Roseau 2016; Isaac 2016; Weeber 2016). 24 Edward Said similarly finds in Camus’s journalism evidence of ‘a moral man in an immoral situation’ (1993: 210). However, his fiction, for Said, reveals a ‘colonial sensibility’ and ‘enacts an imperial gesture’ (213) by denying agency and history to its Arab characters. 25 Memmi builds this argument throughout the chapter entitled ‘The Colonizer Who Refuses’, and notably he dwells on the resistance to anticolonial nationalism from those on the European left (Memmi 2003: 63–88). 26 Further examples of Algerian writers and their engagement with the legacy of Camus can be found in Achour (1992). 27 Derrida and Cixous can be cited as key poststructuralist thinkers who could be claimed, in various ways, by postcolonial Algeria (cf. Hiddleston 2010). 28 Daoud has made similar comments, suggesting that a fixation on ancestors and roots lies behind a regressive national consciousness (cf. Daoud 2016). 29 Glissant discusses this in Faulkner, Mississippi (1999: 114). 30 See Chapter One for an account of Casanova’s theory of world literature. 31 No absolute chronology is set out in the narrative, however Musa’s death is specifically dated to 1942 (Daoud 2015: 33), to correspond with the publication

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date of The Outsider. Harun tells us he was seven when his brother was killed, therefore born in 1935 and making him twenty-seven at the time of Algerian independence and when he commits a murder of his own ‘during the ceasefire of July 1962’ (78), and seventy-eight in the novel’s ‘present-day’ narrative, the year of its first publication, 2013. Nietzsche is a point of reference on the first page of The Myth of Sisyphus, and, as Samantha Novello notes it is known that Camus read Henri Albert’s translations of Nietzsche in the 1930s (Novello 2010: 149). See Daoud’s comments cited in Kaplan (2016: 341). Sylvie Ducas has discussed the specificity of Daoud’s version of the absurd, revealing an Algeria on the edge of the abyss (2015: 189). According to recent estimates, approximately 80 per cent of mosques in Algeria are unregulated and many are controlled by Salafi preachers (Lefèvre 2015: 683; cf. McDougall 2006). In 2015 the Salafist Imam Abdelafatah Hamadache, founder of the Free Sahwa Front, called for Daoud’s public execution ‘for apostasy and heresy […] [for placing] the Quran in doubt, along with the sanctity of Islam’ (cited in Zerofsky 2015: n.p.). The fatwa pronounced against Daoud recalls not only the case of Salman Rushdie in the wake of the publication of The Satanic Verses, but the fate of fellow Algerian writer, Tahar Djout, who was murdered by the Armed Islamic Group during the ‘Black Decade’ of Algeria’s civil war of the 1990s (cf. Lalami 2015). See Jane Hiddleston (2017) for an overview of the development of Algerian and North African writing since 1980, particularly in light of the increasing dominance of Islamic fundamentalism. For a discussion of Daoud’s specific portrayal of Islam in The Meursault Investigation and the controversy it has provoked, see Serrut (2016) and Hiddleston (2017: 158–69). ‘The formula, “everything is permitted”’ (Dostoevsky 2004: 263) is spoken by Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov at the end of the chapter, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. Camus discusses Sergey Nechyaev as ‘the cruel high-priest of a desperate revolution; his most recurrent dream was to found a homicidal order which would permit him to propagate and finally enthrone the sinister divinity that he had decided to serve’, claiming that in the name of the revolution, ‘“all is permitted”’ (2013a: 111). Coetzee fictionalizes him as Sergei Nechaev in The Master of Petersburg. This connection is observed by Hiddleston (2017: 158), Kaplan (2016), Orlando (2015), Roseau (2016) and Yassin-Kassab (2015).

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Index Achebe, Chinua 34–5, 47; Things Fall Apart 34, 86–9, 113, 223 n.6 actor-network theory 138–9; Latour and 10, 12, 91, 111–13, 135, 173 aesthetic(s) 28, 41–2, 133, 135, 149; Heidegger’s 20; Kant’s 63–5, 69–70; Moretti and 57, 61–5, 67–70; Nietzsche’s 49, 101–4, 108, 111, 145; Rancière’s 198–201; world literature and 2–3, 5, 7, 18, see also By Night in Chile; representation Agamben, Giorgio 182; homo sacer 183–4 Ahmad, Aijaz 4, 27, 169 Alworth, David 118–19 Apter, Emily 8, 41 Arac, Jonathan 54, 56 archetype(s) 54, 57, 60, 71 Attridge, Derek 150, 151 Auerbach, Erich 16, 26 ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener’ (Melville) 156, 216; Deleuze and 124, 156–8, 164–5, 202, 204, 216 becoming 101, 107, 130, 181; Deleuze and 124, 126, 178–9, 202–5; writing as 72, 125, 156–61, 164 Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus 8–9, 11, 12 Bhabha, Homi 4, 44, 117; concept of politics 152 Bignall, Simone 11, 21 Bolaño, Roberto 18, 72; on literary criticism 81, see also By Night in Chile Bourdieu, Pierre 29, 32–3, 48, 53, 84, 116–17, 172–3 Brown, Julian 176 Brown, Nicholas 4, 21, 130, 171 The Burial at Thebes (Heaney) 186–7 Butler, Judith 180–2, 185, 194, 196 By Night in Chile (Bolaño) 18, 22; aesthetics and literature in 73–4,

76–81; the church in 75–6; as rhetoric of innocence 22, 73–4, 79–80, 121 Campbell, Chris and Michael Niblett 6, 7, 170, 171 Camus, Albert 104, 132, 206–9; the absurd and 213–16; The Fall 217–18; The Outsider 206, 208, 210, 215; The Plague 208; The Rebel 215 Carpentier, Alejo 65–6 Casanova, Pascale: Greenwich Meridian of Literature 47–8; on literature’s relationship to politics 121, 123–4, 210; modernity/modernism and 31, 36, 45–7, 85, 90–1; peripheral/small literature and 26, 29, 32–7, 42–3, 85; ‘What Is a World?’ 5–6; world literary field and 3, 14, 29–37, 45, 47–9, 84, 114, 116–17; The World Republic of Letters 28–39, 45–8; world-systems theory and 6–7, 29, 31 Caygill, Howard 17, 22, 130–2, 142–3, 148, 155, 159, 194 Chanter, Tina 182, 187–8, 194 Cheah, Pheng 2, 19–21, 45 citizenship 38, 39, 181, 182, 186, 188–9, 192–3, 210, 233 n.17; Rancière and 173–5, 177, 179, 184, 201 Coetzee, J. M. 133; community and 166–7; critique of 149–50; The Life and Time of Michael K 150, see also The Master of Petersburg commodity fetish 64–6, 69 Cooppan, Vilashini 17, 26 Damrosch, David 3, 4, 6, 25, 27, 30, 38, 51 Danticat, Edwidge 38, 40 Daoud, Kamel 208–9, see also The Meursault Investigation Davis, Oliver 178–9 Deckard, Sharae 5, 6, 169, 171, see also Warwick Research Collective

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decolonization 26–7, 35, 125, 209, 210, 211 Deleuze, Gilles 12, 71, 72, 91–2, 129, 171, 178, 185, 203; on judgement 128; on literature in Essays Critical and Clinical 155–8, 159, 161, 164–5, 167, 216; on Nietzsche 103, 123, see also minor literature; Rancière deterritorialization 12–13, 128–9, 156–7, 160, 178, 203–4, 216 difference 190; Deleuze and 123, 230 n.12; Glissant and 128, 178; postcolonialism and 2, 19; Rancière and 176, 178, 192; world literature theory and 16, 25–6, 28, 31, 170 Dimock, Wai-Chee 8, 11, 44–5, 49, 50 Dionysus 94, 97–8, 103, 105; Apollo and 49, 93, 99–102, 104, 106–9, 111, 145, 201, 213 dissensus 19, 180, 183, 194, 213; Bhabha and 152–3; as deterritorialization 178; Rancière and 71, 176–9, 184, 187, 196–200 dissent 3, 7, 130–2, 142–3; literature as 61–2, 68, 71, 116, 127; postcolonialism and 3, 7, 19–21; world literature and 7, 13, 50, 57–8, 109–10, 115–16, see also dissensus Djebar, Assia 208, 210 Dostoevsky, Fyodor (author) 22, 150; The Brothers Karamazov 153–4, 161–2, 165, 215; Crime and Punishment 161; Deleuze on 158; Demons 150, 160; Holquist, Michael on Karamazov 162–3 Douglas, Rachel 40–1 Dove, Patrick 79 Eating Air (Melville) 18, 22, 121; The Bacchae and 93, 99, 108; extremism in 93–4, 96–7, 106; as Nietzschean tragedy 99–100, 102–5, 107–9; revolution in 94, 105–6 Ellison, David 217–18 equality 16, 31–2, 153, 183, 191–2, 196, 217–18; Rancière and 18–19, 175–9, 200, 215, see also inequality Etherington, Ben 4–5 Euripides 77; The Bacchae 93, 97–8, 103, 108

Fanon, Frantz 26–7, 28, 37, 126, 132, 208, 211 Felski, Rita 8, 9–11, 14, 45, 110–11, 115, 133, 172 forces 6, 33, 128, 151–2; active and/or reactive 17, 20–1, 92–3, 123, 131, 132, 155, 158; Latour on 10, 48, 111, 114–15 Frye, Northrop 54 Gilroy, Paul 188, 190, 195 Glissant, Édouard 16, 41, 52, 124, 126, 171, 176, 209; diversion and reversion 122–3, 125; échos-monde 133; opacity 128–30, 178, see also relation Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 40, 44; on Antigone 181, 187; translation and 30–1, 41, 54; Weltliteratur and 1–2, 51–2 Gordimer, Nadine 149–50 Gray, John: Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern 94–7, 191 Hall, Stuart 3–4 Hallward, Peter 171, 200 Harman, Graham 114, 116 Harvey, David 65 Hayes, Patrick 151, 162–3 Hayot, Eric 20 Heaney, Seamus 186, see also The Burial At Thebes Hegel, G. W. F 91–1, 180–1, 183; Hegelian philosophy 46, 63, 68, 101, 163 Hiddleston, Jane 216 Holquist, Michael 162–3, 164, 165 Home Fire (Shamsie): Antigone and 22, 121, 180, 186, 188–9, 193–7, 206, 218; race and 189–90; radicalization in 189, 191–2 Honig, Bonnie 182–3, 185 Huehls, Mitchum 20, 222 n.14, 226 n.3 Huggan, Graham 3 Hughes, Fiona 70 hybridity 3, 52, 122, 126; Bhabha and 25, 27, 129, 152; Latour and 84, 89–90, 92; world literature and 25–6, 44, 49, see also The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Index I Am a Japanese Writer (Laferrière) 18, 39–43 inequality 3, 116, 138, 152, 183; Casanova and 28, 29, 37; Moretti and 51–3, 172; Rancière and 115, 174–6, 215; world literature theory and 6, 19, 170–2 injustice 3, 115, 190–1, 207, see also justice Jameson, Fredric 4; on magical realism 72; The Political Unconscious 5; the political unconscious (concept of) 8–9, 12, 14, 110, 118; on poststructuralism 63, 118; on Third World literature 26–7; transcoding 119 Jelly-Schapiro, Eli 79 Johnson, Randal 32 Jonik, Michael 201, 203 Jung, C. G. 54, 57 justice 88–9, 113, 166–7, 181, 194, 196, 208, 218, see also injustice Kadir, Djelal 8, 14–16, 27, 43, 49 Kennedy, Melissa 5 Kirsch, Adam 125 Kureishi, Hanif 180, 185 Lacan, Jacques 180, 181, 183 Laferrière, Dany 38–9; on translation 41, see also I Am a Japanese Writer Latin American Subaltern Studies Group 74, 81 Latour, Bruno: critique of Bourdieu 53, 116, 173; The Cult of the Factish Gods 85–6, 88, 90–1; Deleuze and 90, 91–2, 155–6, 171, 230 n.12; Great Divide 63–4, 90–1, 96; on Kant 63–4, 69, 91–2; on local vs. global 113; Nietzsche and 92, 111, 116; post-criticism and 9–10, 71; principle of irreducibility 48, 171; We Have Never Been Modern 48–9, 63, 83–4, 87, 89, 91–2, see also actornetwork theory; forces Lazarus, Neil 4, 5, 7, 9, 27, 37, 169 literary criticism 5–6, 8–11, 15, 81, 113 literature 9–11, 42–3, 44–5, 119–20, 129, 131, 136; Algerian 208–10; as health 156, 158–9, 205; and politics 13–14,

253

32–7, 38, 49, 57–8, 76–8, 81, 121–6, 134–5, 141–2, 197–9, 201, 203; as symptomatology 22, 158, see also world literature López-Vicuña, Ignacio 73, 76, 77, 80 McDougall, James 209 Marx, Karl 8, 51–2, 65–6, 95, 111, 131, 173, 184 Marxist 97, 152; dialectics 68; literary theory 4, 8, 118; philosophy 73, 74, 77, 95, 103, 130–1, 132, 172, 191; politics 198; world economy and 52, see also commodity fetish; postcolonialism The Master of Petersburg (Coetzee) 124, 150; critique of capitalism in 151–2; Dostoevsky in 22, 150, 159–61, 164–6, 218; intertextuality in 153–4, 160–2, 164, 166; revolution/ revolutionaries in 151–2, 154, 159, 162 May, Todd 178 Melville, Pauline: The Migration of Ghosts 93, see also Eating Air Memmi, Albert 37–8, 85, 126, 207 The Meursault Investigation (Daoud): the absurd in 213, 214; Algerian society in 22, 210–12, 215; The Fall and 217–18; The Outsider and 206–7, 212; religion in 213–15 The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Roy) 179–80; critique of globalization in 137–9; gender and 143–5; hybridity in 139–41; media in 147–8; politics of 134, 136–7 minor literature 13, 58–9, 71, 123–5 modernity 2, 4, 7, 94–7, 140–1; Casanova on 45–8, 117; Latour on 48, 63–4, 68, 85–7, 89–92, 140; Moretti on 46, 60–2, 64, 66–9 Moretti, Franco: ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ 28, 51–2, 56; distant reading and 51, 54, 58, 59, 113; evolutionary theory and 51, 53, 55–6, 59–60, 71; on Kant 62, 64, 70; literary form 13–14, 53–7; literature as consent and 9–10, 58, 61, 67, 73, 173; on magic 64–5, 69; on magical/marvellous realism 65–6; Modern Epic 10, 58, 64–7; on modern literature (see modernity);

254

Index

on postcolonialism 4; Signs Taken For Wonders 9–10, 28, 53, 60–5, 67–8, 69; on tragedy 61–2, 67–8; world-systems theory and 7, 19, 50–3, 56, 60, 71, 169, 170, 172, see also rhetoric of innocence Mufti, Aamir 1–2, 7, 16, 25, 28 n+1 121–2, 123, 125–6, 149 naming 145, 185, 197, 212, 215–16 national identity 34–5, 39–41, 143, 190, 195–6, 209–10 nationalism 134, 137, 145, 186–7, 207 national literature 16, 25–7, 30, 34–7, 45, 52, 59 new racism 188, 190, 195 Niblett, Michael 5, 169, see also Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 12, 21, 64, 118, 132, 142–3; The Birth of Tragedy 49, 98, 100–4, 107, 110–11, 146, 149, 200–1 non-contemporaneity 46, 64 O’Bryen, Rory 78 orientalism 2, 25–6 Parla, Jale 56 Parry, Benita 4, 5, 117–18, 150, 169 phenomenon and noumenon (Kant) 63, 64, 69, 100, 167 Picasso, Pablo 75–6 Pizer, John 44 postcolonial (concept of) 17–18, 21–2, 26–7, 37–8; Deleuze and 11, 17, 21, 22; literature 3, 26–7, 37, 121–2, 126, 133; world literature and 1–5, 18, 19, 25, see also Casanova; dissent postcolonial criticism 68; poststructuralist vs. Marxist 3–4, 6, 13, 21–2, 50, 117–18, 150, 170–1 post-criticism 9–11, 14, 71, 110–11, 115, 172 Prendergast, Christopher 35, 36, 124 Radical Islam 93–6, 103, 189, 191–2, 214 Rancière, Jacques 18–19, 50, 127, 211–12, 213, 214; on Antigone 184–5; on Bourdieu 172–3; Deleuze and 179, 198,

201–5; ethics and 183–5; Nietzsche and 200–1; on pedagogy 172–2; politics (concept of) 174–9, 198, see also dissensus; equality; inequality rebel(s) 157, 159, 180, 185, 215–16 registration (literary), see representation relation 7, 12, 64–5, 69, 111, 130, 133, 142, 173, 199; Glissant and 40–1, 52, 127–9, 133; in Latour’s philosophy 48, 83–4, 91–2, 112–15, see also forces representation (aesthetic, concept of) 3–8, 43, 62, 84, 117–18, 119–20, 125; Kant’s 65, 69; Latour’s 63, 85–90, 118; Nietzsche’s 100–1, 103–4, 108; Rancière’s 199–200 representation (political, concept of) 177, 180–1, 186 resistance, see dissent ressentiment 17, 21, 22, 105, 111, 123, 125, 128, 130–2, 148, 155, 159, 161, 163, 180, 185, 211, 217–19 revolution 61, 95, 177, 191; Deleuze on 161, 165, 204, see also Eating Air; Gray, John; The Master of Petersburg; minor literature rhetoric of innocence 68, 71–2, 73–4, 79; Moretti on 10, 32, 59, 65–7, 73 Rhys, Jean 15, 17 Rockhill, Gabriel 198 Roy, Arundhati 133; on art and literature 136, 141; critique of 134–5, 149; The God of Small Things 134, 149; politics of 134–5, see also The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Said, Edward 2, 4, 206, 208 Sallis, John 12–13, 98, 101, 111 Scanlan, Margaret 151 Shamsie, Kamila: on becoming a British citizen 192, 211; on ISIS 191, see also Home Fire Shapiro, Stephen 5, 6, see also Warwick Research Collective Siskind, Mariano 2, 18, 21 Sophocles 77; Antigone 22, 180–7, 193, see also The Burial at Thebes Spivak, Gayatri 4, 15, 67–8, 117, 127, 139, 144, 177 surface-reading 8–9, 12, 13

Index Tanke, Joseph 173, 178 Tanner, Michael 102 thing-in-itself, see phenomenon and noumenon Thorne, Christian 29, 31, 36, 47, 85, 117 time 11, 44–5, 46–7, 62–3, 85, 90–1, 96 Trotsky, Leon 52 Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio

78

Walcott, Derek 42–3, 131 Walkowitz, Rebecca 3, 4, 41 Wallerstein, Immanuel 6, 29, 33, 36, 49–50, 116–17, 192; utopistics 126–7, 130, 156 Walonen, Michael 5, 6, 170 war on terror 22, 186–7, 189 Warwick Research Collective 5, 6–7, 13, 19, 49–50, 52, 85, 109–10, 115, 119, 169–72 Weltliteratur 16, 31, see also Goethe world-bank literature 171

255

world-ecology 5, 6 world literature (concept of) 1–7, 14–17, 25–8, 30–2, 35–6, 43–4, 49–50, 51–3, 57–8, 71–2, 90, 92, 109–10, 113–14, 121, 169–72; colonialism and 1–2; Latour and 113–14; materialist critique 4–8, 43, 47, 85, 169–71; Nietzsche on 104; the world and 5–6, 14–16, 19–21, 48–9, 113–14, 125 world-system (concept of) 29, 50–2, 163; world literature and 5–8, 16, 19, 29, 50–1, 126, 169–72, see also Casanova; Moretti Wrathall, Mark 20 Young, Robert

1, 2–3

Žižek, Slavoj: on Agamben 183; and Antigone 180, 182–3, 185–6; on Rancière 178 Zukauskaite, Audrone 183